Glenn Greenwald: David Brooks and the deceitful tactics of the Beltway pundit

As I've noted many times before, virtually every column David Brooks writes is grounded in one of two highly misleading tactics and, on special occasions, like today, are grounded in both. That's all there is to him. He just re-cycles these same two themes over and over in different forms.

The first tactic is merely the most commonplace conceit of the standard Beltway pundit: Brooks takes whatever opinions he happens to hold on a topic, and then -- without citing a single piece of evidence -- repeatedly asserts that "most Americans" hold this view, and then bases his entire "argument" on this premise. Thus, the only way for Democrats to have any hope of winning elections is to repudiate their radical, rabid Leftist base and instead follow Brooks' beliefs, because that is "centrism." This is actually a defining belief of the Beltway pundit, and it is as intellectually corrupt as an argument gets.

Americablog: Law firm of Bush's AG pick represents Iranian group "suspected" of being a "'front' for Iranian espionage and anti-American activities"

by Joe Sudbay (DC) · 9/25/2007 05:48:00 PM ET

Well, well, well. The GOPers have been apoplectic about Iran this week. It's not quite a state secret that Cheney wants to start a war with Iran. Today, Senators Kyl and Lieberman are pushing a dangerous Senate resolution that could move the U.S. closer to a war with that country. Giuliani, McCain and Romney have been in a frenzy about Iranian's president speech at Columbia. Duncan Hunter, who is easily one of the biggest buffoons in Congress (no small feat), wants to cut all federal funding for Columbia.

Now comes word from ABC's "The Blotter" that Bush's pick to be our nation's chief law enforcment officer has represented an alleged Iranian "front" group:

Frog deformities linked to farm pollution

11:31 25 September 2007
NewScientist.com news service
Catherine Brahic

Fertiliser run-off could be causing an increase in frog deformities in North American lakes, according to a new study.

Frogs with extra or malformed legs have been a focus of attention in North America since 1995, when schoolchildren in Minnesota studying wetlands found a high number of frogs with missing or extra legs.

Treasury Rekindles Social Security Debate

By Michael A. Fletcher

Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, September 25, 2007; Page D01

The Bush administration stepped up its attempt to build support for restructuring Social Security yesterday, saying in a Treasury Department report what it has said elsewhere: that the popular program will require either tax increases or cuts in benefits to remain viable in its current form.

For much of the past year, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. has been meeting with members of Congress from both parties in hopes of provoking action to put Social Security on secure financial footing. While those discussions have yielded no solutions, Paulson said, they have revealed that members of Congress share the administration's concern about severity of the problem.

Dan Froomkin: What Has Bush Done to the Government?

Special to washingtonpost.com
Monday, September 24, 2007; 1:30 PM

The last two times the Pew Research Center asked people to describe President Bush in a single word, chief among the overwhelmingly negative responses was the word "incompetent."

What makes that particularly fascinating is that it's a realization that the public has reached pretty much on its own.

Naomi Wolf's Call to Patriots

A BUZZFLASH INTERVIEW

Democracies take nurturing. They're easy to pull down. The Founders understood that. It's a very dangerous time.

-- Naomi Wolf, Author, The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

* * *

We owe a great debt to Naomi Wolf, who cut her teeth in writing about a new generation of Feminist thinking, for writing this wake up call to America.

In interviewing Wolf, we could hear one of her children in the background. And in many ways, young people were on her mind when she penned "The End of America," because she is profoundly concerned that they may lose the gift of democracy and live under a dictatorship.

Naomi Klein Debates Alan Greenspan

By Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!
Posted on September 25, 2007, Printed on September 25, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/63480/

AMY GOODMAN: As the credit crisis continues to grow and the US dollar hits a new low, we turn today to the former Chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan headed the central bank in the United States for almost two decades. He was first appointed to this position in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan. Greenspan retired in January 2006, after deciding the fate of national interest rates under four different presidents. Dubbed "the Maestro," he was widely regarded as one of the world's most influential economic policymakers. He has just written a new 500-page memoir; it's called The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.

Modern Humans Retain Caveman's Survival Instincts

Jeanna Bryner
LiveScience Staff Writer
LiveScience.com
Tue Sep 25, 9:20 AM ET

Like hunter-gatherers in the jungle, modern humans are still experts at spotting predators and prey, despite the developed world's safe suburbs and indoor lifestyle, a new study suggests.

The research, published online this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, reveals that humans today are hard-wired to pay attention to other people and animals much more so than non-living things, even if inanimate objects are the primary hazards for modern, urbanized folks.

Booman Tribune: The Big Neo-Con

by BooMan
Mon Sep 24th, 2007 at 04:38:00 PM EST

Even though I pegged the 'Syria has North Korean nuclear weapons' story as horsecrap from the get-go, it's nice to get some confirmation. Nonetheless, the surfeit of stories that were seeded throughout the British and neo-con press shows that something is afoot. Perhaps Seymour Hersh put it best in a recent interview with Jewish Journal:

JJ: You turned 70 this year. Why keep working so hard?

SH: I don't work that hard. I write four or five pieces a year. Secondly, what do you want me to do? Play professional golf? I can't do that. You do what you can do. And I'm in a funny spot because I have an ability to communicate with people I have known for a number of years. They trust me, and I trust them, so I keep on doing these little marginal stories.

JJ: That's all they are? Marginal?

TPM Cafe: Simple Error My Ass

By Larry Johnson | bio

Well, if you buy the nonsense reported in the Washington Post, I have a bridge to sell you. According to Joby Warrick and Walter Pincus, the snafu involving missing nukes was just a bad mistake. They write:

A simple error in a missile storage room led to missteps at every turn, as ground crews failed to notice the warheads, and as security teams and flight crew members failed to provide adequate oversight and check the cargo thoroughly. An elaborate nuclear safeguard system, nurtured during the Cold War and infused with rigorous accounting and command procedures, was utterly debased, the investigation’s early results show.

Sorry boys and girls, but that is nonsense. You do not walk into an ammo/weapons bunker and sort thru a bunch a cruise missiles like a college freshman searching their laundry basket in the dark for a pair of matching socks.

An American Prius?

Japanese automakers have crushed the Big Three with their hybrids. Here's how U.S. carmakers could catch up.

By Daniel Gross
Posted Saturday, Sept. 22, 2007, at 6:43 AM ET

When it comes to hybrids, the heavyweight tussle between American and Japanese automakers appears to be a hopeless mismatch. Toyota introduced its gas-electric hybrids in 1997 (when regular was $1.18 per gallon), and in June announced its 1 millionth hybrid sale. In the first eight months of this year, Toyota sold 189,945 hybrids in the United States, with Honda notching a respectable 24,000. As for the Americans? Don't ask. Ford doesn't break out sales of Escape and Mercury Mariner hybrids. At General Motors, hybrids—like long-promised market-share gains—are mostly concepts.

New study discovers why few people are devoid of racial bias

Why are some individuals not prejudiced? That is the question posed by a provocative new study appearing in the September issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The authors investigate how some individuals are able to avoid prejudicial biases despite the pervasive human tendency to favor one’s own group.

Robert Livingston of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and Brian Drwecki of the University of Wisconsin conducted studies that examined white college students who harbored either some or no racial biases. What is remarkable about the findings is that only seven percent did not show any racial bias (as measured by implicit and explicit psychological tests), and that nonbiased individuals differed from biased individuals in a psychologically fundamental way -- they were less likely to form negative affective associations in general.

Researchers Find Eye Movement Can Affect Problem-solving, Cognition

By Steve McGaughey, Beckman Institute Writer

A pair of Beckman Institute researchers has discovered that by directing the eye movements of test subjects they were able to affect the participants’ ability to solve a problem, demonstrating that eye movement is not just a function of cognition but can actually affect our cognitive processes.

Previous research (Grant and Spivey, 2003) has shown a relationship between eye movements and problem-solving but Psychology Professor Alejandro Lleras, a member of the Human Perception and Performance group, and Ph.D. candidate Laura Thomas have taken that work in a groundbreaking direction.

Neocon Catholic leaders nurtured by GOP and Conservative Philanthropy on their heels

Catholic voters migrated back to the Democrats in the 2006 midterm elections. Was it a temporary move or are they heading home for the long term?

In the 2004 presidential election cycle, Catholics, whose vote was considered open to both parties, were carefully courted by the Republicans. GOP organizers -- accompanied by their neoconservative Catholic brethren -- brought the "traditional family values" mantra to the table, highlighting supposed agreement between Catholics and conservative evangelical Christians on two major issues -- abortion and same-sex marriage.

Generals opposing Iraq war break with military tradition

By Mark Sauer

UNION-TRIBUNE STAFF WRITER

September 23, 2007

The generals acted independently, coming in their own ways to the agonizing decision to defy military tradition and publicly criticize the Bush administration over its conduct of the war in Iraq.

What might be called The Revolt of the Generals has rarely happened in the nation's history.

Paul Krugman: Politics in Black and White

Last Thursday there was a huge march in Jena, La., to protest the harsh and unequal treatment of six black students arrested in the beating of a white classmate. Students who hung nooses to warn blacks not to sit under a “white” tree were suspended for three days; on the other hand, the students accused in the beating were initially charged with second-degree attempted murder.

And one of the Jena Six remains in jail, even though appeals courts have voided his conviction on the grounds that he was improperly tried as an adult.

Tipping the Scales of Justice in Jena

By Amy Goodman, King Features Syndicate
Posted on September 19, 2007, Printed on September 24, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/63052/

The tree at Jena High School has been cut down, but the furor around it has only grown.

"What did the tree do wrong?" asked Katrina Wallace, a stepsister of one of the Jena Six, when I interviewed her at the Burger Barn in Jena, La. "I planted it 14 years ago as a tree of knowledge."

Fred Thompson: Desperate Republicans Cheer for a Reagan Wannabe

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com
Posted on September 24, 2007, Printed on September 24, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/63351/

I can say exactly when I first knew that Fred Dalton Thompson is dangerous. It is 12:07 p.m. on Sunday, September 9th, in Manchester, New Hampshire, just outside a restaurant called Chez Vachon. Thompson has just served up another mumbling, noncommittal tour through a packed diner of breakfasting locals, sitting glumly through the requisite this-sure-is-great-coffee shot. Then, once the needed photos are banked, the lumbering B-list character actor -- who plays a video called "The Hunt for Red November" at every campaign stop and sells buttons that, in an unsettlingly McLuhanian twist, pimp him as the "Law and Order candidate" -- tries to make a quick beeline back to his bus. But a cheeky local TV reporter shouts at him before he can reach the door.

"Senator!" the reporter calls out. "What's harder, playing the president or being the president?"

Albion's Seed, Part II: The Cavaliers 1642-1675

-- by Sara

Introduction
Part I

The wave of Puritan migration from England to America slowed dramatically after 1641. Through the English Civil War and Cromwell's Protectorate, the Puritans found themselves politically and economically ascendant in England -- which greatly diminished their interest in leaving it. But the Puritan victory came at the expense of another English subculture, whose flight from Cromwell propelled the second wave of English migration to America.

These were the Cavaliers -- loyal Royalists, many of them nobles and courtiers, who sought refuge from the chaos in Virginia. David Hackett Fischer notes that Southern historians have long debated the actual extent and effects of the Cavaliers' influence on the region's culture; but 210 pages of Albion's Seed are given over to studying their specific folkways and cultural values as they existed on the estates of southern England, and as they later expressed themselves in the Chesapeake region. The detailed analysis is convincing: like the Puritans, the Cavaliers brought the culture they knew, and transplanted it firmly and deeply in the soil of tidewater Virginia. In the process, they added a second enduring English voice to America's conversation about rights, freedom, and power.

A Light on Slaves' Lives

Model Cabin at Mount Vernon Fulfills a Curiosity About the Toiling Hundreds

By Annie Gowen

Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, September 20, 2007; Page B01

Joann Bagnerise couldn't bring herself to visit George Washington's home at Mount Vernon, driving by without stopping, thinking too much about the hundreds of slaves who had labored in the mansion and fields beyond the brick walls.

Even yesterday, as the Dumfries resident sat in the warm sun near the estate's new model of a slave cabin, she said she was filled with conflicting emotions.