CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — Hurricane season has arrived, sparking renewed debate regarding possible links between global warming and the frequency and severity of hurricanes, heat waves and other extreme weather events.
Meanwhile, a related discussion has ensued among international-security experts who believe climate-change-related damage to global ecosystems and the resulting competition for natural resources may increasingly serve as triggers for wars and other conflicts in the future.
These are good times for Jerome Corsi. Already notorious for his factually challenged book-length takedown of 2004 Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry, Unfit For Command, the 61-year-old Corsi has another hit on his hands. His new book, Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality, has made Corsi a hot commodity again on the right-wing radio circuit, the bane of the Obama campaign and catapulted to the top slot on the New York Times bestseller list. With his newfound notoriety, Corsi has brought his pathographic anti-Obama narrative to hundreds of thousands of readers--and millions on radio and TV--just as he did with Kerry. Corsi has become the court bard of the conservative movement. "The goal is to defeat Obama," Corsi told the New York Times. "I don't want Obama to be in office."
Corsi's success represents the apotheosis of a long, strange trip from the furthest shores of the right into the national spotlight. During George W. Bush's first term, Corsi was a little-known financial services marketing specialist. In 1995, according to the Boston Globe, he coaxed twenty people into a shadowy investment venture in Poland that ultimately lost them a total of $1.2 million. "It ruined my career in the brokerage business, and it was a sad story for a lot of people," said Bradley Amundson, one of those enlisted into Corsi's bungled scheme. The FBI opened an investigation but never filed any charges.
By David Cho
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, August 21, 2008; A01
Regulators had long classified a private Swiss energy conglomerate called Vitol as a trader that primarily helped industrial firms that needed oil to run their businesses.
But when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission examined Vitol's books last month, it found that the firm was in fact more of a speculator, holding oil contracts as a profit-making investment rather than a means of lining up the actual delivery of fuel. Even more surprising to the commodities markets was the massive size of Vitol's portfolio -- at one point in July, the firm held 11 percent of all the oil contracts on the regulated New York Mercantile Exchange.
Progressive political change in American history is rarely incremental. With important exceptions, most of the reforms that have advanced our nation's status as a modern, liberalizing social democracy were pushed through during narrow windows of progressive opportunity -- which subsequently slammed shut with the work not yet complete. The post–Civil War reconstruction of the apartheid South, the Progressive Era remaking of the institutions of democratic deliberation, the New Deal, the Great Society: They were all blunt shocks. Then, before reformers knew what had happened, the seemingly sturdy reform mandate faded and Washington returned to its habits of stasis and reaction.
The Oval Office's most effective inhabitants have always understood this. Franklin D. Roosevelt hurled down executive orders and legislative proposals like thunderbolts during his First Hundred Days, hardly slowing down for another four years before his window slammed shut; Lyndon Johnson, aided by John F. Kennedy's martyrdom and the landslide of 1964, legislated at such a breakneck pace his aides were in awe. Both presidents understood that there are too many choke points -- our minority-enabling constitutional system, our national tendency toward individualism, and our concentration of vested interests -- to make change possible any other way.
The Washington Post's White House reporter, Michael Abramowitz, was asked yesterday during a chat to name some of his "favorite people who work at the White House but who are not in the spotlight," and Abramowitz happily and easily offered a long list:
I like your question. One of the things you find in covering the White House is that many of the staff are extremely friendly and dedicated, and it's fun to get to know some of them. The truth is reporters tend to hang out with the people in the [White House] press office, so the names I might give you tend to be lower-level press aides, like Carlton Carroll, Stuart Siciliano and Pete Seat -- and spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore. They are extremely helpful to me (and I don't mean this list to be all-inclusive.)
I also enjoy talking with deputy chief of staff Joel Kaplan and deputy national security adviser Jim Jeffrey -- I wouldn't be surprised if Joel is one day a cabinet officer or a CEO somewhere. He has an interesting life story -- he joined the Marines after graduating from Harvard, then became a lawyer and is basically the top aide to Chief of Staff Josh Bolten.
Once upon a time there was a master narrative, and a neater little theory-of-everything you never did see. In its 19th century heyday it rationalized the having of the haves and commanded the deference of the have-nots; it spoke from the pulpit, the newspaper and the professor's chair.
Its name was market, and to slight it in even the smallest way was to take your professional life into your hands. In 1895, the economist Edward Bemis found this out when he was dismissed from John D. Rockefeller's University of Chicago thanks to his "attitude on public utility and labor questions," as he put it in a letter to Upton Sinclair. Professors elsewhere paid the same price for intellectual independence.
George Monbiot
The Guardian
Tuesday August 19 2008
It's a novel way to take your own life. Just as Russia demonstrates what happens to former minions that annoy it, Poland agrees to host a US missile defence base. The Russians, as Poland expected, respond to this proposal by offering to turn the country into a parking lot. This proves that the missile defence system is necessary after all: it will stop the missiles Russia will now aim at Poland, the Czech Republic and the UK in response to, er, their involvement in the missile defence system.
The American government insists that the interceptors, which will be stationed on the Baltic coast, have nothing to do with Russia: their purpose is to defend Europe and the US against the intercontinental ballistic missiles Iran and North Korea don't possess. This is why they are being placed in Poland, which, as every geography student in Texas knows, shares a border with both rogue states.
In 1962, two years after losing the presidency to John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon ran and lost the governor's race in California. At a post-election press conference, Nixon famously told reporters that they wouldn't "have Richard Nixon to kick around any more, because, gentlemen, this is my last press conference." It wasn't. He won the presidency in 1968, escalated the Vietnam War, was re-elected in 1972, and two years later he was forced to resign in disgrace over the Watergate Affair.
ORLANDO — Democrat Barack Obama used his appearance Tuesday at a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention to attack Republican John McCain's critique of him to the group a day earlier - but got a cooler reception than did the Vietnam veteran running against him for president.
Obama denied McCain's assertions that he was for failure in Iraq, or shifting his anti-war stance out of expediency, or in any way basing his foreign policy on a strategy to win the presidency. "Let's have a serious debate, and let's debate our disagreements on the merits of policy - not personal attacks," Obama said.
Rour months before the United States invaded Iraq, the Department of Defense was secretly working with Vice President Dick Cheney's old company, Halliburton Corp., on a secret deal that would give the world's second largest oil services company total control over Iraq's oil fields, according to interviews with Halliburton's most senior executives.
Previously undisclosed Halliburton documents obtained by The Public Record confirm that controlling the world's second largest oil reserves was a top priority for the Bush administration. Additionally, the deal between the Department of Defense and Halliburton unit Kellogg, Brown & Root to operate Iraq's oil industry saved Halliburton from imminent bankruptcy.
CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- A new analysis of government data is the first to link low-level arsenic exposure, possibly from drinking water, with type 2 diabetes, researchers say.
The study's limitations make more research necessary. And public water systems were on their way to meeting tougher U.S. arsenic standards as the data were collected.
Barack Obama's image suffers under John McCain attacks, poll finds
The presidential race remains tight, with respondents to a Times/Bloomberg poll choosing Obama by 45% to McCain's 43%, a statistical dead heat. Obama's race remains an issue with many voters.
A sizable minority of Americans find themselves at the intersection of these two long-standing trends in news consumption. Integrators, who get the news from both traditional sources and the internet, are a more engaged, sophisticated and demographically sought-after audience segment than those who mostly rely on traditional news sources. Integrators share some characteristics with a smaller, younger, more internet savvy audience segment - Net-Newsers - who principally turn to the web for news, and largely eschew traditional sources.
Is Barack Obama exaggerating when he compares his campaign to the great progressive moments in US history? We asked two dozen writers, thinkers, and historians to answer that question; read their responses below.I think the most interesting thing about the answers is the degree to which just about everyone sounds ambivalent or confused. It's a very odd array of answers from people who are immersed in politics and history and who should be able to rattle off a compelling rationale for the candidate without any problem, even if they disagree with the notion that it's a movement on par with civil rights or the labor movement. I think all of the people queried want Obama to win, but virtually none of them seem to be sure what he's going to do.
Here we go again.
Just two months after House Democrats angered liberal voters by agreeing to controversial warrantless wiretapping legislation, party leaders are signaling compromise on another issue that could alienate many progressive supporters: offshore oil drilling.
It wasn't meant to be this way. Democrats, led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), have railed against a drilling expansion for months. Yet in a tense election year, when public perception becomes political reality and nuance is often the first to flee the debate, Republicans seem to have sold their version of the drilling tale more effectively.
Large herbivores are likely to have a bigger influence on the fate of our planet than we thought.
Current climate simulations predict an increase in shrub-like vegetation in northern regions as the world heats up, and these plants should absorb some of the carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and help buffer further temperature increase. Now it seems that grazers are set to eat this potential carbon sponge.
Georgia, Georgia
No peace can I find.
Just an old sweet song
Keeps Georgia on my mind.Stuart Gorrell and Hoagy Carmichael
It’s not like I really wanted to spend the weekend thinking about last week’s small war between Russia and the Caucasian republic of Georgia – not when I could have been watching women’s beach volleyball at the Olympics instead.
But ever since the obscure dispute over the breakaway province of South Ossetia suddenly flared into a good old fashioned Cold War crisis (putting the US – or at least John McCain – toe-to-toe with the Russkies) I’ve been trying to figure out exactly how America found itself obligated to defend the security and territorial integrity of a place name most Americans probably associate with peach trees and Scarlett O’Hara.
DENVER -- When Colorado voters were deciding whether to require that 10 percent of the state's electricity come from renewable fuels, the state's largest utility fought the proposal, warning that any shift from coal and natural gas would be costly, uncertain and unwise.
Then a funny thing happened. The ballot initiative passed, and Xcel Energy met the requirement eight years ahead of schedule. And at the government's urging, its executives quickly agreed to double the target, to 20 percent.
The McCain camp is whining today and attacking NBC and Andrea Mitchell because she had the nerve to make an accurate observation about Rick Warren’s forum. Andrea Mitchell said this Meet the Press:
The Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because that–what they’re putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.
The global financial crisis is set to get worse, with a large US bank likely to collapse in the next few months, a former IMF chief economist has warned.
Kenneth Rogoff's comments came as shares in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sank on a report that the home lenders would, in effect, be nationalised.
In an interview from October, 2006, that has only now seen the light of day, Stephen Spoonamore, one of the world's leading experts in cyber crime and a self-described "life-long Republican" destroys Diebold's already non-existent credibility.
Spoonamore lays it out for anyone to see and understand. If you care about America and it's survival as a democratic republic, you'll watch this interview.
The interviews are on YouTube and are being carried by a new site created by Velvet Revolution, RoveCyberGate.com.
The late John Flynn, an environmentalist raised in West Virginia's Big Coal River Valley, was a farsighted man. In 1995, Flynn met a Catholic sister fighting poverty there. They talked about the abuses that Massey Coal Company's operations had inflicted on the valley. There were the mining jobs denied to local people and an economy on its knees, people forced out of their homes to accommodate mining in hollows, and front porches blanketed by coal dust. Flynn wondered aloud about placing windmills on top of the mountains surrounding them to produce power. Why, he suggested, couldn't an array of windmills replace the giant coal mines that dominated the valley?
WASHINGTON - August 18 - The Natural Resources Defense Council filed a lawsuit today to uncover critical information that the US government is withholding about the risks posed by pesticides to honey bees. NRDC legal experts and a leading bee researcher are convinced that the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has evidence of connections between pesticides and the mysterious honey bee die-offs reported across the country. The phenomenon has come to be called “colony collapse disorder,” or CCD, and it is already proving to have disastrous consequences for American agriculture and the $15 billion worth of crops pollinated by bees every year.
EPA has failed to respond to NRDC’s Freedom of Information Act request for agency records concerning the toxicity of pesticides to bees, forcing the legal action.
Arab world sees Bush's response to Georgia-Russia crisis as hypocriticalBelieve Your Eyes
The U.S. president should be 'too ashamed to speak about the occupation of any country, he is already occupying one,' one observer says.
President Bush's condemnation of Russia as a bullying intimidator in the Georgian conflict struck a hypocritical note in a Middle East that has endured violent reverberations from the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, and where the sharp White House rhetoric against Moscow echoes what many Arabs feel in turn about the U.S.
Who will win the presidential debates? What does each candidate’s use of words say about how he would govern as president? Can Obama’s rhetorical skills lift him to the heights of Lincoln, FDR, and Reagan—or will his speechmaking do him in? After watching all 47 (!) of the primary season’s debates, our correspondent has the answers—and some harsh criticism for the moderators.
Recently I did what no sane person would: I watched the entire set of presidential primary debates, in sequence, like a boxed set of a TV show. In scale this was like three or four seasons’ worth of The Sopranos. The Democrats had 26 debates, nearly all more than one hour long, and all but one of them with both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The Republicans had 21, if you count the session for which a single “debater” showed up. That was the NAACP forum in Detroit, which all eight Democrats but only Representative Tom Tancredo of the Republicans agreed to attend. I had seen only two of the debates in real time because so few were carried internationally. Those that were available in streaming video were too slow and jerky to be watchable in China, where I’ve been living. (It eventually took more than two weeks of round-the-clock Internet downloading to collect all the files.)Pastor Warren, the host of last night's forum was just on CNN. In an interview with Rick Sanchez the pastor admitted McCain was not even at the Church for the first half hour of the event. This admission comes as a surprise to those of us who watched the event and were told many times that McCain was at the Church and in isolation.
CNN says they talked to McCain's camp and they said no one in his camp was listening. The honor system, are you kidding me?
Hard as it can be to keep up with the latest Iraq predictions, there's been an effort for the past several months to portray the Iraqi Army as increasingly competent and self-reliant. This, of course, has a long pedigree, as every single year -- stretching back to Donald Rumsfeld in September 2003 -- we're told that the Iraqi security forces are getting better and better, but if we withdraw from Iraq the Iraqi security forces will... fall apart. That makes it impossible to give face-value credence to the claims of improvement in the Iraqi army and police, but just because it's an expedient argument for the warmongers, doesn't automatically make it a lie.
On "Meet the Bloggers" Friday, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., said that there is a "collapse" of the middle class and that nothing short of a revolution will be needed to reverse it.
"What we really need is a political revolution in this country," Sanders said, beginning with countering the corporate media spin on what is happening in the economy.
Sanders indicted the media for not probing what is happening to working people on a consistent basis. "We need to raise the consciousness of the public" so that more Americans will ask such basic questions as why America is the only industrialized nation without universal health care or why the disparity between working-class families and the wealthy are at record levels.
By rights, John McCain should be getting hammered on economics.
After all, Mr. McCain proposes continuing the policies of a president who’s had a truly dismal economic record — job growth under the current administration has been the slowest in 60 years, even slower than job growth under the first President Bush. And the public blames the White House, giving Mr. Bush spectacularly low ratings on his handling of the economy.
Meanwhile, The Times reports that, according to associates, Mr. McCain still “dials up” Phil Gramm, the former senator who resigned as co-chairman of the campaign after calling America a “nation of whiners” and dismissing the country’s economic woes as nothing more than a “mental recession.” And Mr. Gramm is still considered a top pick for Treasury secretary.
PHILADELPHIA, Aug. 17, 2008 — A previously unrecognized group of air pollutants could have effects remarkably similar to harmful substances found in tobacco smoke, Louisiana scientists are reporting in a study scheduled for presentation today at the 236th National Meeting of the American Chemical Society. Inhaling those pollutants exposes the average person up to 300 times more free radicals daily than from smoking one cigarette, they added.
The discovery could help explain the long-standing medical mystery of why non-smokers develop tobacco-related diseases like lung cancer, said H. Barry Dellinger, Ph.D., the Patrick F. Taylor Chair of Environmental Chemistry at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge.
by John K. Castle
Growing evidence suggests American consumers, businesspeople, and political leaders should all be bracing for double-digit inflation, probably as early as 2009.
The relative price stability of the past 15 years is giving way to worsening inflation, despite the recent softening of oil prices. The Consumer Price Index for all items shows the inflation rate averaged 2.6% a year from 1992 through 2007 but has doubled since January, reaching an annual rate of 5.6% in July (BusinessWeek.com, 8/14/08). By next year, the monthly figure could hit double digits, and the inflation rate for 2009 overall could triple 2007's 2.85%.
Oh, the spectacle of it all -- and don't think I'm referring to those opening ceremonies in Beijing, where North Korean-style synchronization seemed to fuse with smiley-faced Walt Disney, or Michael Phelp's thrilling hunt for eight gold medals and Speedo's one million dollar "bonus," a modernized tribute to the ancient Greek tradition of amateurism in action. No, I'm thinking of the blitz of media coverage after Dr. Bruce Ivins, who worked at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland, committed suicide by Tylenol on July 29th and the FBI promptly accused him of the anthrax attacks of September and October 2001.
You remember them: the powder that, innocuously enough, arrived by envelope -- giving going postal a new meaning -- accompanied by hair-raising letters ominously dated "09-11-01" that said, "Death to America. Death to Israel. Allah is great." Five Americans would die from anthrax inhalation and 17 would be injured. The Hart Senate Office Building, along with various postal facilities, would be shut down for months of clean-up, while media companies that received the envelopes were thrown into chaos.
I arrived at JFK Airport two weeks ago after a short vacation to Syria and presented my American passport for re-entry to the United States. After 28 hours of traveling, I had settled into a hazy awareness that this was the last, most familiar leg of a long journey. I exchanged friendly words with the Homeland Security official who was recording my name in his computer. He scrolled through my passport, and when his thumb rested on my Syrian visa, he paused. Jerking toward the door of his glass-enclosed booth, he slid my passport into a dingy green plastic folder and walked down the hallway, motioning for me to follow with a flick of his wrist. Where was he taking me, I asked him. "You'll find out," he said.
We got to an enclosed holding area in the arrivals section of the airport. He shoved the folder into my hand and gestured toward four sets of Homeland Security guards sitting at large desks. Attached to each desk were metal poles capped with red, white and blue siren lights. I approached two guards carrying weapons and wearing uniforms similar to New York City police officers, but they shook their heads, laughed and said, "Over there," pointing in the direction of four overflowing holding pens. I approached different desks until I found an official who nodded and shoved my green folder in a crowded metal file holder. When I asked him why I was there, he glared at me, took a sip from his water bottle, bit into a sandwich, and began to dig between his molars with his forefinger. I found a seat next to a man who looked about my age -- in his late 20s -- and waited.
On Sept. 7, 2006, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, stood before an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced that a crisis was brewing. In the coming months and years, he warned, the United States was likely to face a once-in-a-lifetime housing bust, an oil shock, sharply declining consumer confidence and, ultimately, a deep recession. He laid out a bleak sequence of events: homeowners defaulting on mortgages, trillions of dollars of mortgage-backed securities unraveling worldwide and the global financial system shuddering to a halt. These developments, he went on, could cripple or destroy hedge funds, investment banks and other major financial institutions like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
The audience seemed skeptical, even dismissive. As Roubini stepped down from the lectern after his talk, the moderator of the event quipped, “I think perhaps we will need a stiff drink after that.” People laughed — and not without reason. At the time, unemployment and inflation remained low, and the economy, while weak, was still growing, despite rising oil prices and a softening housing market. And then there was the espouser of doom himself: Roubini was known to be a perpetual pessimist, what economists call a “permabear.” When the economist Anirvan Banerji delivered his response to Roubini’s talk, he noted that Roubini’s predictions did not make use of mathematical models and dismissed his hunches as those of a career naysayer.
NEW YORK — Wall Street investors ply the dog days of summer next week with few economic indicators on the calendar but stiff headwinds from volatile oil prices, rising inflation and slowing global growth.
With crude oil prices spiralling downward, stoking hopes of inflation relief, investors appeared willing to turn a blind eye to consumer price numbers showing US inflation at a 17-year high.
The most cherished dream of conservative Washington is that liberalism can somehow be defeated, finally and irreversibly, in the way that armies are beaten and pests are exterminated. Electoral victories by Republicans are just part of the story. The larger vision is of a future in which liberalism is physically barred from the control room - of an “end of history” in which taxes and onerous regulation will never be allowed to threaten the fortunes private individuals make for themselves. This is the longing behind the former White House aide Karl Rove’s talk of “permanent majority” and, 20 years previously, disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff’s declaration to the Republican convention that it’s “the job of all revolutions to make permanent their gains”.
When I first moved to contemplate this peculiar utopian vision, I was struck by its apparent futility. What I did not understand was that beating liberal ideas was not the goal. The Washington conservatives aim to make liberalism irrelevant not by debating, but by erasing it. Building a majority coalition has always been a part of the programme, and conservatives have enjoyed remarkable success at it for more than 30 years. But winning elections was not a bid for permanence by itself. It was only a means.
AS I went on vacation at the end of July, Barack Obama was leading John McCain by three to four percentage points in national polls. When I returned last week he still was. But lo and behold, a whole new plot twist had rolled off the bloviation assembly line in those intervening two weeks: Obama had lost the election!
The poor guy should be winning in a landslide against the despised party of Bush-Cheney, and he’s not. He should be passing the 50 percent mark in polls, and he’s not. He’s been done in by that ad with Britney and Paris and by a new international crisis that allows McCain to again flex his Manchurian Candidate military cred. Let the neocons identify a new battleground for igniting World War III, whether Baghdad or Tehran or Moscow, and McCain gets with the program as if Angela Lansbury has just dealt him the Queen of Hearts.
Given the extent to which the self-definition of elite Washington reporters depends not only on their access to power but also on their role in reinforcing its prerogatives, it would be odd if eight years of a limitlessly corrupt, pathologically dishonest and lawless presidency did not leave its mark. And while we might have hoped that these actions would help the press to stiffen its collective backbone, unfortunately it has done just the opposite.
Republicans are running a presidential campaign at a moment of historic unpopularity for their party and with a candidate who has a panoply of potentially negative associations for voters. In the first place, John McCain's stances on the issues, while consistent with the desires of his party's base, are at odds with the professed wishes of the American people. Second, while he bills himself as a man of principle, he has in fact changed his position--"flip-flopped"--repeatedly on fundamental issues such as immigration, taxes, campaign finance, reproductive choice, etc. (See "Loving McCain," July 7.)A commenter here on Friday noted what appears to be a rather glaring contradiction in the case against Bruce Ivins. In response to criticisms that the FBI's case contains no evidence placing Ivins in New Jersey, where the anthrax letters were sent, The Washington Post published an article -- headlined "New Details Show Anthrax Suspect Away On Key Day" -- which, based on leaks from "government sources briefed on the case," purported to describe evidence about Bruce Ivins' whereabouts on September 17 -- the day the FBI says the first batch of anthrax letters were mailed from a Princeton, New Jersey mailbox. The Post reported:
A partial log of Ivins's work hours shows that he worked late in the lab on the evening of Sunday, Sept. 16, signing out at 9:52 p.m. after two hours and 15 minutes. The next morning, the sources said, he showed up as usual but stayed only briefly before taking leave hours. Authorities assume that he drove to Princeton immediately after that, dropping the letters in a mailbox on a well-traveled street across from the university campus. Ivins would have had to have left quickly to return for an appointment in the early evening, about 4 or 5 p.m.
MSNBC's Rachel Maddow reported on Thursday that a group of college students may have succeeded where the FBI failed in identifying the killers of journalist Daniel Pearl.
Although four men were convicted of Pearl's murder in Pakistan in 2002, there were thought to be as many as 19 more suspects.
A new account of Haiti's recent history shows how the genuinely radical politics of Lavalas and its leader, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, proved too threatening to the country's wealthy elite and their foreign backers.
Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment
Peter Hallward, Verso, 480pp, £16.99
Noam Chomsky once noted that "it is only when the threat of popular participation is overcome that democratic forms can be safely contemplated". He thereby pointed at the "passivising" core of parliamentary democracy, which makes it incompatible with the direct political self- organisation and self-empowerment of the people. Direct colonial aggression or military assault are not the only ways of pacifying a "hostile" population: so long as they are backed up by sufficient levels of coercive force, international "stabilisation" missions can overcome the threat of popular participation through the apparently less abrasive tactics of "democracy promotion", "humanitarian intervention" and the "protection of human rights".
WASHINGTON — Hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding that have gone to upgrade the nation's voting machines since 2003 were used to purchase touch-screen systems that many states are now scrapping because of concerns about their security and reliability.
State governments in Alaska, California, Florida, Iowa, Maryland, Tennessee and New Mexico have decided to replace their touch-screen electronic machines. While some states have completed the switch, others won't finish replacing the machines until 2010. Nationwide, the federal government spent $1.2 billion on new voting machines between 2003 and 2007.Russia lost the original Cold War, but the United States is now weaker than it was 20 years ago
Saturday, 16 August 2008
What would George Kennan, peerless diplomat and father of the "containment" doctrine that guided America in the Cold War have said? Russian troops strut about Georgia as if they own the place; an American President lambastes the Kremlin, while Russia's foreign minister sneeringly comments that "you can forget about ... Georgia's territorial integrity", hinting at de facto annexation of the disputed regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Would not Kennan, were he still alive, conclude that history has gone on a 60-year fast rewind, and that the Cold War is back?
The answer is an unequivocal no. Vladimir Putin's Russia is a most unlovable power. But it is no longer the world-wide ideological adversary of the West, using proxy wars on four continents to advance its cause. In some respects it is not adversary but ally (albeit an often fickle one) of the US on issues such as Iran, North Korea and the Middle East.
By Spencer S. Hsu and Carrie Johnson
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 16, 2008; A01
The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.
The proposed changes would revise the federal government's rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation's 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.
Only someone with a tenuous grasp on reality and a poor knowledge of history and the world could have looked into the flinty eyes of a onetime colonel in the Soviet KGB and "found him very straightforward and trustworthy."
That was newly elected President George W. Bush's pronouncement in June 2001, on his first meeting with Russia's Vladimir Putin.
This week President Bush got another look into the eyes and soul of Putin, as did the rest of the world, as Putin sent Russian T-72 tanks and Su-25 fighter-bombers roaring into the independent neighboring state of Georgia.
Editor: John Feffer
In commenting on the war in the Caucasus, most American analysts have tended to see it as a throwback to the past: as a continuation of a centuries-old blood feud between Russians and Georgians, or, at best, as part of the unfinished business of the Cold War. Many have spoken of Russia’s desire to erase the national “humiliation” it experienced with the collapse of the Soviet Union 16 years ago, or to restore its historic “sphere of influence” over the lands to its South. But the conflict is more about the future than the past. It stems from an intense geopolitical contest over the flow of Caspian Sea energy to markets in the West.
This struggle commenced during the Clinton administration when the former Soviet republics of the Caspian Sea basin became independent and began seeking Western customers for their oil and natural gas resources. Western oil companies eagerly sought production deals with the governments of the new republics, but faced a critical obstacle in exporting the resulting output. Because the Caspian itself is landlocked, any energy exiting the region has to travel by pipeline – and, at that time, Russia controlled all of the available pipeline capacity. To avoid exclusive reliance on Russian conduits, President Clinton sponsored the construction of an alternative pipeline from Baku in Azerbaijan to Tbilisi in Georgia and then onward to Ceyhan on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast -- the BTC pipeline, as it is known today.
Last week, the Washington Post published a story that appeared to finally tie Bruce Ivins to that New Jersey mailbox where the 2001 anthrax letters were mailed -- something the feds have been unable to do in their six-year investigation.
The Post breathlessly reported in a story -- headlined "New Details Show Suspect Was Away On Key Day" -- that Ivins took part of the day off on Sept. 17.So far, the international economic consequences of the war in the Caucasus have been fairly minor, despite Georgia’s role as a major corridor for oil shipments. But as I was reading the latest bad news, I found myself wondering whether this war is an omen — a sign that the second great age of globalization may share the fate of the first.
If you’re wondering what I’m talking about, here’s what you need to know: our grandfathers lived in a world of largely self-sufficient, inward-looking national economies — but our great-great grandfathers lived, as we do, in a world of large-scale international trade and investment, a world destroyed by nationalism.
August 14th, 2008 - 6:11pm ET
Watch Media Matters' Paul Waldman decimate author liar Jerome Corsi:
Jeffery Feldman usefully reminds us that Corsi was basically an accessory to a crime:
The Swift Boat group did more than just lie about John Kerry in a book. They broke Federal Election laws, were found guilty, and paid a huge fine.
"I've written eight books since 2004": I love that he considers this a selling point.
Dig especially the bit seventeen minutes in on former Cheney aide and longtime GOP operative Mary Matalin's role in the book: "Once Mr. Corsi's book came out it fit right in to the conservative promotion machine.Washington, DC — A long series of federal court rulings that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has been derelict in protecting the water quality of the Everglades is prompting calls for a probe of the agency’s regional operations. The most recent federal court decision takes EPA to task for repeatedly violating the very Clean Water Act that it is supposed to administer.
On July 29, 2008, Miami U.S. District Judge Alan Gold excoriated EPA, finding that the agency had shirked its duty to enforce basic water quality standards and, in so doing, “violated its fundamental commitment and promise to protect the Everglades” and “acted arbitrarily and capriciously.” This is only the latest in a long series of cases stretching back more than a decade that have all gone against EPA.
By Mark Lange
from the August 13, 2008 edition
Blue Ridge Summit, PA. - Would you sign a contract that says, "Any term can be changed at any time for any reason, including no reason"? Anyone who uses a credit card already has.
Such are the absurd terms of the consumer credit-card industry, which is poised to be the next big crisis (after housing) that banks have aided and abetted in US households.
Americans have now racked up nearly $1 trillion in credit-card debt. As housing equity shrinks and costs rise, agencies such as Moody's report swelling numbers of accounts with balances three or more payments past due. Reinforced by abusive industry practices, the plastic safety net is becoming a permanent cage.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama hit back Thursday with a 40-page rebuttal to the best-selling book "The Obama Nation," arguing the author is a fringe bigot peddling rehashed lies.
Jerome Corsi's anti-Obama book, "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality," claims the Illinois senator is a dangerous, radical candidate for president. The book is a compilation of all the innuendo and false rumors against Obama — that he was raised a Muslim, attended a radical, black church and secretly has a "black rage" hidden beneath the surface.
This is one scandal the National Enquirer has not reported. No babies with mystery fathers, no former vice presidential candidates cowering in a hotel basement to escape the paparazzi.
This scandal, relegated to the business pages if covered at all, is un-juicy compared to l'affaire Edwards, with a wife betrayed, children humiliated, hypocrisy exposed -- it is a small wonder, after the ethical hemming and hawing, that the big-time publishers and broadcasters jumped in to take part in the fun.
By Gary Matsumoto
Aug. 11 (Bloomberg) -- On March 11, the day the Federal Reserve attempted to shore up confidence in the credit markets with a $200 billion lending program that for the first time monetized Wall Street's devalued collateral, somebody else decided Bear Stearns Cos. was going to collapse.
In a gambit with such low odds of success that traders question its legitimacy, someone wagered $1.7 million that Bear Stearns shares would suffer an unprecedented decline within days. Options specialists are convinced that the buyer, or buyers, made a concerted effort to drive the fifth-biggest U.S. securities firm out of business and, in the process, reap a profit of more than $270 million.
Of course, "unless something happens" is the biggest qualifier in the world, more than adequate to CYA me should Obama prevail. It's politics. There are almost three months. Odds are something will happen.
Still, it wasn't supposed to be this way. Obama's electoral handicaps--his racial identification and short resume--should have easily been eclipsed by Bush's--er, McCain's well-stocked aviary of albatrosses. McCain was and remains short of money. His campaign organization is a mess. Republican bosses are unenthusiastic, both about his prospects and about the direction he would take his party should he win. He has aligned himself with the most unpopular aspect of the wildly unpopular outgoing administration, the Iraq War.The number of homeowners stung by the dramatic decline in the U.S. housing market jumped last month as foreclosure filings grew by more than 50 percent compared with the same month a year ago, according to data released Thursday.
Nationwide, more than 272,000 homes received at least one foreclosure-related notice in July, up 55 percent from about 175,000 in the same month last year and up 8 percent from June, RealtyTrac Inc. said. That means one in every 464 U.S. households received a foreclosure filing last month.
Irvine, Calif.-based RealtyTrac monitors default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions. More than 77,000 properties were repossessed by lenders nationwide in July, the company said.
In political campaigns, timing is almost everything. Candidates communicate with voters over a long period of time before voters actually vote. What candidates say to these voters is, of course, important, but it turns out that when they say it also influences voter preferences.
Why Obama's reliance on lofty rhetoric has succeeded thus far is a puzzle addressed in the paper "It's Time to Vote: The Effect of Matching Message Orientation and Temporal Frame on Political Persuasion," forthcoming in the Journal of Consumer Research. The research, co-authored by the University of Minnesota's Akshay Rao, Hakkyun Kim (Concordia) and Angela Lee (Northwestern), demonstrates that the timing and content of political messages affects voters, particularly swing voters.
MBL, WOODS HOLE, MA—The search for what causes a debilitating shell disease affecting lobsters from Long Island Sound to Maine has led one Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) visiting scientist to suspect environmental alkyphenols, formed primarily by the breakdown of hard transparent plastics.
Preliminary evidence from the lab of Hans Laufer suggests that certain concentrations of alkyphenols may be interfering with the ability of lobsters to develop tough shells. Instead, the shells are weakened, leaving affected lobsters susceptible to the microbial invasions characteristic of the illness.
Regnery has published a major anti-Obama book -- David Freddoso's "The Case Against Barack Obama: The Unlikely Rise and Unexamined Agenda of the Media's Favorite Candidate" -- and 2004 Swiftboater Jerome Corsi has written his -- "The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality." All sorts of folks are peddling anti-Obama t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers and more. Now it's David Bossie's turn for a big politico/merchandizing play.
Although still a relatively young man, Bossie, the president of Citizens United, has been a political mudslinger for a nearly two decades. He gained some national notoriety in the 1990s when he was relentless in his pursuit of Bill and Hillary Clinton, and later that decade was fired from his position as an investigator for a House committee. Earlier this year, Bossie "took out classified newspaper ads in Columbia University's newspaper and the Chicago Tribune ... searching for [Obama's] ... term paper," supposedly a thesis on Soviet nuclear disarmament, Jim Popkin, NBC News Senior Investigative Producer, reported in late July. Although he could find it, he wrote in an e-mail to NBC News that "A thesis entitled Nuclear Disarmament, written at the height of The Cold War in 1983, might shed some light upon what Barack Obama thought about our most pressing foreign policy issue for 40-plus years (U.S.-Soviet Relations)."
John McCain's chief foreign policy adviser and his business partner lobbied the senator or his staff on 49 occasions in a 3 1/2-year span while being paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the government of the former Soviet republic of Georgia.
The payments raise ethical questions about the intersection of Randy Scheunemann's personal financial interests and his advice to the Republican presidential candidate who is seizing on Russian aggression in Georgia as a campaign issue.
McCain warned Russian leaders Tuesday that their assault in Georgia risks "the benefits they enjoy from being part of the civilized world."
We recently announced that registration would be opening soon (see below) for a Saturday, September 27th, BuzzFlash-sponsored conference in Philadelphia: "Bridging the Gap Between Progressives and the Working Class: A Dialog on Common Values."
We're slowly revealing the all star and diverse line up of progressives, labor, and working class speakers (and this will be interactive, not just speeches). First we were proud to let you know that Richard Trumka, second in command at the AFL-CIO, will be addressing the group. And we also revealed that Joe Bageant, author of "Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War," will be speaking at the conference.
A single injection of modified cells could halt the advance of rheumatoid arthritis, say UK scientists.
The Newcastle University team is about to start small-scale safety trials of the jab, which will hopefully stop the immune system attacking the joints.
By Aaron Smith, CNNMoney.com staff writer
Last Updated: August 14, 2008: 1:26 PM EDT
NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- The annual inflation rate surged to 5.6% in July - the highest point in 17 years, the government announced Thursday.
The previous month's reading on annual inflation was 5%.
The July increase matched the 5.6% level in January 1991, when the Persian Gulf War was raging.
Three years ago, I wrote the following:
New allegations indicate that American civilian military leadership may have used an off-book quasi-military team to address political issues, placing those concerns above securing peace in the region, RAW STORY has learned.
Three U.S. intelligence sources and a source close to the United Nations Security Council say that the Pentagon civilian leadership under the guidance of Stephen Cambone, appointed to lead Defense Department intelligence in March 2003, dispatched a series of “off book” missions out of the ultra-secretive Office of Special Plans (OSP). The team was tasked to secure the following in order of priority: fallen Navy pilot Scott Speicher, WMD and Saddam Hussein.
By George Soros
Published: August 11 2008 19:21 | Last updated: August 11 2008 19:21
The recent compromise struck between the Treasury and Democrats in Congress on the fate of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage guarantors, constitutes the worst of all possible worlds. The Treasury offered a blank cheque to come to the rescue, if necessary, but the managements of both companies were kept in place. They know that their survival depends on not drawing on that blank cheque. They will therefore do everything in their power to reduce the need for any new equity capital that would be dilutive. In short, as privately owned but undercapitalised financial institutions, the GSEs cannot fulfil their stated mission of providing stability, liquidity and affordability to the nation’s housing finance system.
July 28, 2008
AUSTIN, Texas — The first study to compare the performance of different types of green roofs has been completed by the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at The University of Texas at Austin and suggests that buyers shouldn't assume these roofs are created equal.
Interest in vegetated roofs has increased as water and energy conservation becomes more important to property owners. Yet the study of six different manufacturers' products found the green roofs varied greatly in capabilities such as how much they cooled down a building's interior and how much rainwater they captured during downpours.
Washington, DC—Democratic politicians receive a 40% increase in contributions in the 30 days after appearing on the comedy cable show The Colbert Report. In contrast, their Republican counterparts essentially gain nothing. These findings appear to validate anecdotal evidence regarding the political impact of the program, such as the assertions by host Stephen Colbert that appearing on his program provides candidates with a “Colbert bump” or a rise in support for their election campaigns.
This analysis of one of America’s most well-known pop icons of recent years is conducted by political scientist James H. Fowler (University of California, San Diego), who is also a self-identified fan of the show. The research appears in the July issue of PS: Political Science and Politics, a journal of the American Political Science Association. It is online at /imgtest/PSJuly08Fowler.pdf.
It sounds very nice to say, as Barack Obama has done perhaps too much, that the upcoming election is about "hope" and "change." But those anodyne words conceal what I think is the public's true desire: Negation.
Come November, voters will have a chance to rid themselves of a political order that they have come to hate. Sen. Obama's task is to help them heave it overboard.
It seems hard to believe after all the happy Republican talk a few years ago about a "permanent majority," but the public is now more unified in its antipathy toward the GOP than it has been in a long time -- maybe since Watergate, maybe since the Hoover administration.
I said goodbye to a few old friends this morning.
I dropped Sabrina and Duncan at day camp and continued on down the road to my community's recycling depot. There, I walked up to the big green "mixed plastics" bin and tossed in my FridgeSmart stackables, Ziploc Twist n' Locs and, perhaps most painful of all, my beloved half-cup-size Rubbermaid Servin' Savers -- indispensable snack-stashers that fit perfectly inside my kids' lunch boxes.
Editor’s Note: Despite the conventional wisdom that the U.S. news media is “in the tank” for Barack Obama, something close to the opposite seems to be true, as many political reporters repeat scurrilous attacks on the Democrat without fact-checking or grill him in interviews to show how tough they can be.
For instance, Big Media acted almost as a surrogate for John McCain in pounding Obama over the Iraq War “surge” and in misrepresenting his comments to a closed Democratic caucus. In this guest essay, Brent Budowsky also recalls the silence of the press when McCain lied about Obama’s canceled visit to a U.S. troop hospital:
What is the responsibility of reporters, editors and publishers when a candidate for high office is the target of a campaign of attack and personal destruction employing the systematic use of lies, smears, innuendo and character assassination?
by Ryan Avent
Will expensive gas kill the suburbs? Journalists can't stop asking the question, and an increasing number of suburb defenders are rising in protest. The easy answer is: it depends. It depends on what happens to gas prices, and it depends on how we respond. But the best way to think about how American urban geography will change in response to expensive gas is to break the question down into smaller parts. I'm going to try to do that today.
Smaller part one is this: will expensive gas lead to rejuvenated center cities? One thing that often gets neglected in news stories on this question is the extent to which center cities were resurgent before gas prices really took off. Central areas in both older cities and Sunbelt boomtowns began seeing new waves of investment beginning in the late 1990s. There were three main reasons for this. A big one was the rapid decline in urban crime that had plagued cities in the late 80s and early 90s.
WASHINGTON: Blackwater Worldwide, the contractor whose provision of private security in Iraq has been under scrutiny, and its affiliated companies may have improperly obtained more than $100 million in contracts meant for small businesses, according to federal auditors.
A report by the Small Business Administration's inspector general, issued in July, found that Blackwater and its affiliates, including Presidential Airways, won 39 contracts in the fiscal years 2005, 2006 and 2007 despite indications that the companies employed more than the number specified by the U.S. government. In some cases, the report said, the companies also had higher revenues than allowed for a small business.
I think that what we're seeing now -- no-bid contracts -- is disgusting. ... That's the closest thing that you're ever going to get to government-backed business. At the end of the day, that's really what it's about. It's not about free market utopianism. It's about government by business.
-- Thomas Frank, author of The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule
* * *
One election cycle back, Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? helped Democrats understand the problem they had holding on to their erstwhile base of working middle America. Now in his latest book, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, Frank nails the conservatives who have outsourced, privatized, shrunk, and absolved government of any impulse it might have to hold itself accountable to citizens.
As reviewer James Warren of the Chicago Tribune sums up Frank's expose of the conservatives now in charge of government: "Its leaders laugh off the idea of the public interest as airy-fairy nonsense; they caution against bringing top-notch talent into government service; they declare war on public workers. They have made a cult of outsourcing and privatizing, they have wrecked established federal operations because they disagree with them, and they have deliberately piled up an Everest of debt in order to force the government into crisis. The ruination they have wrought has been thorough; it has been a professional job."
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Parts of the Endangered Species Act may soon be extinct.
New regulations, which don't require the approval of Congress, would reduce the mandatory, independent reviews government scientists have been performing for 35 years, according to a draft first obtained by The Associated Press.
Two-thirds of U.S. corporations paid no federal income taxes between 1998 and 2005, according to a new report from Congress.
The study by the Government Accountability Office, expected to be released Tuesday, said about 68 percent of foreign companies doing business in the U.S. avoided corporate taxes over the same period.
Collectively, the companies reported trillions of dollars in sales, according to GAO's estimate.
"It's shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., who asked for the GAO study with Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich.
Gathman takes note of something important. The book originated, in part, as a challenge from my father, delivered in our last conversation, on Wednesday, April 26, 2006 in his room at Mount Auburn hospital. Dad seemed, at the time, to be recovering (slightly) from a bout of pneumonia, and had the energy to ask what I was working on. I told him of some recent lectures on predation. "You should write a short book on corporate predation," he said. "It will make you the leading economic voice of your generation." And then he added his typically modest, typically paternal touch, "If I could do it, I would put you in the shade."
Iraq and China are set to revive a $1.2 billion oil deal that was canceled after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, the Iraq's oil ministry said Sunday.
An initial agreement with China is expected to be signed at the end of August to develop the billion-barrel Ahdab oil field south of Baghdad, the ministry said in a statement.
BILL MOYERS:There's always been money to be made from people who have no money. That's because low income families turn to fast, easy, and pre-approved credit to make ends meet. But once they've signed on the dotted line, they often find their troubles have just begun. According to the Federal Reserve, the amount of money owed by households earning $30,000 or less between 1989 and 2004, soared to $691 billion — that's an increase of nearly 250%.
These households are what one entrepreneur describes as "low-hanging fruit" — just waiting to be plucked. Nothing new about this.
Loan sharks have been around to prey on the poor for centuries, but now the sharks are trying to spiff up their image, relocating from back alleyways to friendly-looking storefronts.
by Danny Schechter
Let me try a few words out on you: “Charge It,” “Swipe It” and “Priceless.”
You know exactly what I am talking about. We all have credit and debit cards. We all use them, and many of us keep our lives going because of them.
That is, until the bill becomes due.
The draft Democratic Party platform that was sent out last week puts health care reform front and center. “If one thing came through in the platform hearings,” says the document, “it was that Democrats are united around a commitment to provide every American access to affordable, comprehensive health care.”
Can Democrats deliver on that commitment? In principle, it should be easy. In practice, supporters of health care reform, myself included, will be hanging on by their fingernails until legislation is actually passed.
Remember, at the beginning of the week, when the New York Times reported that "at least 10 people" had access to that critical flask of anthrax linking Dr. Bruce Ivins to the 2001 anthrax attacks?
At the time, we thought that was really significant. Ten people? How did the FBI eliminate the other nine people as suspects to know Ivins was the guilty one?
For those who didn't happen to notice, perhaps because it wasn't exactly front-page news in most of the country, NASA's James Hansen, the man who first alerted Congress to the dangers of global warming 20 years ago, returned to testify before the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming this week. This time around, he was essentially offering a final warning on the subject. Unless the U.S. begins to act soon, he pointed out, "it will become impractical to constrain atmospheric carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas produced in burning fossil fuels, to a level that prevents the climate system from passing tipping points that lead to disastrous climate changes that spiral dynamically out of humanity's control."
For the "elements of a 'perfect storm,' a global cataclysm" being assembled, he placed special blame on the "CEOs of fossil energy companies [who] know what they are doing and are aware of [the] long-term consequences of continued business as usual." He added that they should, in his opinion, "be tried for high crimes against humanity and nature… I anticipate testifying against relevant CEOs in future public trials." That's a novel thought in our nation's capital. Oh, and while he was at it, he probably should have thrown in George W., Dick C., and crew. What they haven't done (and what they've blocked from being done) over these last eight years may turn out to be their greatest crime of all. Talk about smoking guns... or is it melting ice?
Here's the problem:
Beginning with their stunning inability to defeat the most detested politician in American history, Richard Nixon, and continuing through their stunning inability to defeat the most detested politician in the world, George II, the Democrats are the masters of blowing it. And they don't just simply "blow it" - they blow it especially when the electorate seems desperate to give it to them.In his new book, Mike's Election Guide 2008, Michael Moore explains what Barack Obama can to do to lose the presidency again.
Seattle
THE purpose of a party platform is pandering, but it is pandering of a particular sort. The Democratic Party’s platform committee has produced its 2008 edition, and now this draft awaits approval at the Democratic National Convention later this month. Like all platforms, it is not an outreach document. It is aimed at the faithful, under the assumption that only they will read it.
The platform is Democrats’ assurance that the party still loves them, their reward for supporting a candidate who may not have been their first choice and their consolation for betrayals yet to come. Much of it is written in code, lest it fall into the wrong hands.
Translating the document is no simple task. First, an alarmist note. Democrats favor “tough, practical and humane immigration reform.” And, “We will provide immediate relief to working people who have lost their jobs, families who have lost their homes and people who have lost their way.” It’s not clear what that third item refers to. Tax credits for G.P.S. devices? Presumably, “people who have lost their way” doesn’t mean illegal immigrants trying to find the border.
The Washington Post’s ombudsman says the newspaper’s original source for a quote that was used to portray Barack Obama as a megalomaniac now disputes the Post’s negative interpretation that has spread across cable TV, the Internet and even into a John McCain attack ad.
Post ombudsman Deborah Howell also acknowledges that neither Post reporter who relied on the misleading quote spoke directly with the source, checked out its accuracy, or made any independent effort to determine the context of the remark, which was made to a closed Democratic caucus meeting on Capitol Hill on July 29.
In her column, “The Anger Over an Obama Quote,” Howell adds that she has been contacted by about 160 people, including congressional officials, who said the Post twisted the meaning of the quote by taking it out of context. But the newspaper still refuses to run a full-scale correction or a clarification or even print a letter protesting the distortion.
