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Archive: POLITICS

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The Desert Southwest

There has plenty of attention given to the rapid changes taking place in the Arctic, and their relationship to global warming. But there are less well-known, very disturbing signs emerging from other parts of the world, including the Southwestern U.S.

By 2003, for example, Lake Powell had fallen b nearly eighty feet in three years, and crucial reservoirs along the Rio Grande were barely more than mud puddles. The Southwestern winter of 2005-06, meanwhile, was one of the driest on record, and Phoenix went 143 days without a single drop of rain. Rare interruptions in the drought, like the Noachian monsoon of last summer (parts of El Paso received an incredible thirty inches of rain), have been insufficient to adequately recharge aquifers or refill reservoirs, and in 2006 both Arizona and Texas reported the worst drought losses to crops and herds in history (about $7 billion altogether).

Persistent drought, like melting ice, rapidly reorganizes ecosystems and transforms entire landscapes. Without sufficient moisture to produce protective sap, millions of acres of pinyon and ponderosa pine have been ravaged by plagues of bark beetles; these dead forests, in turn, have helped to kindle the firestorms that have burst into the suburbs of Los Angeles, San Diego, Phoenix and Denver, as well as destroyed part of Los Alamos. In Texas the grasslands have also burned -- nearly 2 million acres in 2006 alone -- and as topsoil blows away, prairies are reverting to desert.

Some climatologists have not hesitated to call this a "mega-drought," even the "worst in 500 years." Others have been more cautious, not yet sure whether the current aridity in the West has surpassed the notorious thresholds of the 1930s (the Dust Bowl in the southern Plains) or 1950s (devastating drought in the Southwest). But the debate is possibly beside the point: The most recent and authoritative research finds that the "evening redness in the West" (to invoke the portentous subtitle of Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian) is not simply episodic drought but the region's new "normal weather."

In startling testimony before the National Research Council last December, Richard Seager, a senior geophysicist at the Lamont Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, warned that the world's leading climate modelers were cranking out the same result from their super-computers: "According to the models, in the Southwest a climate akin to the 1950s drought becomes the new climate within the next few years to decades."

Read the rest of Mike Davis' report at Alternet.org

Tragic Ratios

Needless to say, I'm very sorry about the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech. But the reaction amongst politicians and the mainstream media in the U.S. is a sad, and revealing indictment of just how selfish and myopic the general American public remains.

Let's put this tragedy into perspective: 31 innocent people were killed in a country of 300 million. Today in Baghdad, at least 157 people were reported to have been killed. Iraq has a population of 26 million.

Now, I won't bore you with too much math, but the Virginia Tech tragedy produced a total of .0000001 percent deaths, while the reported civilian deaths in Iraq today represent .000006 of their population. That's a ratio of sixty to one. In other words, for a mathematically equivalent event to occur in the U.S., 1,800 people would have to die.

Eighteen hundred!

So when 31 civilians die in the U.S., profoundly important government hearings (i.e. the Gonzales hearing) are postponed, we are bombarded with non-stop coverage of the event, including interactive victim charts, etc., politicians all chime in about what an awful tragedy it is, and questions about the role of gun control (or lack thereof) are re-ignited.

Yet when the equivalent of 500 to 2,000 innocent people are massacred every day – every day – in Iraq, we all, with very few exceptions, give it little more than a passing thought. Never mind the fact that we started the grotesque chain reaction with a dishonest and unnecessary invasion – we're still fueling the destructive fire with our inept occupation.

Think about it.

And if, like me, you believe that innocent human beings are equally valuable, and that everything possible should be done to help stop the violence which causes innocent people to be killed and maimed, then contact your local representative and senator, and urge them to bring pressure to end the Iraq war.

Remember: nothing can be done to bring back those unfortunate students, but something can be done to help save the next hundred potential Iraqi victims, and the next, and the next, and the next...

The Imus Flap

I wasn't planning on commenting, and virtually all of the reactions I've read have been uninspiring (or worse). However, John Rogers has a post on the topic which is worth reading. Here's his intro:

...as to "Who Can Say What?". Allow me to clarify:

Cackling, rich old white men are not allowed to call innocent hard-working scholarship girls "nigger whores."

Didn't think that was so hard, but ... hey. Glad to be of help.

John's full post

The Military–Industrial Complex

That famous expression, written into Eisenhower's valedictory speech by Malcolm Moos, has taken on sharp significance during the past several years. And, as Ismael Hossein-zadeh, Professor of Economics at Drake University points out, it receives far less attention than it should.

Critics of the recent U.S. wars of choice have long argued that they are all about oil. "No Blood for Oil" has been a rallying cry for most of the opponents of the war.

It can be demonstrated, however, that there is another (less obvious but perhaps more critical) factor behind the recent rise of U.S. military aggressions abroad: war profiteering by the Pentagon contractors. Frequently invoking dubious "threats to our national security and/or interests," these beneficiaries of war dividends, the militaryindustrial complex and related businesses whose interests are vested in the Pentagon's appropriation of public money, have successfully used war and military spending to justify their lion's share of tax dollars and to disguise their strategy of redistributing national income in their favor.

This cynical strategy of disguised redistribution of national resources from the bottom to the top is carried out by a combination of (a) drastic hikes in the Pentagon budget, and (b) equally drastic tax cuts for the wealthy. As this combination creates large budget deficits, it then forces cuts in non-military public spending as a way to fill the gaps that are thus created. As a result, the rich are growing considerably richer at the expense of middle and lowincome classes.

Despite its critical importance, most opponents of war seem to have given short shrift to the crucial role of the Pentagon budget and its contractors as major sources of war and militarism-a phenomenon that the late President Eisenhower warned against nearly half a century ago. Perhaps a major reason for this oversight is that critics of war and militarism tend to view the U.S. military force as primarily a means for imperialist gains-oil or otherwise.

The fact is, however, that as the U.S. military establishment has grown in size, it has also evolved in quality and character: it is no longer simply a means but, perhaps more importantly, an end in itself-an imperial force in its own right. Accordingly, the rising militarization of U.S. foreign policy in recent years is driven not so much by some general/abstract national interests as it is by the powerful special interests that are vested in the military capital, that is, war industries and warrelated businesses.

For some perspective, Hossein-zadeh quotes William D. Hartung, Senior Fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York:

Proposed U.S. military spending for FY 2008 is larger than military spending by all of the other nations in the world combined.

At $141.7 billion, this year's proposed spending on the Iraq war is larger than the military budgets of China and Russia combined. Total U.S. military spending for FY2008 is roughly ten times the military budget of the second largest military spending country in the world, China.

Proposed U.S. military spending is larger than the combined gross domestic products (GDP) of all 47 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

The FY 2008 military budget proposal is more than 30 times higher than all spending on State Department operations and non-military foreign aid combined.

The FY 2008 military budget is over 120 times higher than the roughly $5 billion per year the U.S. government spends on combating global warming.

The FY 2008 military spending represents 58 cents out of every dollar spent by the U.S. government on discretionary programs: education, health, housing assistance, international affairs, natural resources and environment, justice, veterans' benefits, science and space, transportation, training/employment and social services, economic development, and several more items.

Read the full article at the indespensible Counterpunch.org

The "War Czar"

As you may well have heard, the Administration, desperate to take attention away from numerous, rapidly unfolding scandals, sought to find someone suitable for a newly proposed 'War Czar' position. The effort promptly blew up in their faces, as no less than three of those being considered walked right away from the opportunity. One of those three, retired Marine Corps general John J. Sheehan, spoke out in an editorial in today's Washington Post:

It would have been a great honor to serve this nation again. But after thoughtful discussions with people both in and outside of this administration, I concluded that the current Washington decision-making process lacks a linkage to a broader view of the region and how the parts fit together strategically. We got it right during the early days of Afghanistan -- and then lost focus. We have never gotten it right in Iraq. For these reasons, I asked not to be considered for this important White House position. These huge shortcomings are not going to be resolved by the assignment of an additional individual to the White House staff. They need to be addressed before an implementation manager is brought on board.

The full editorial can be found here

Public Opinion VS The Beltway Elite

The "Surge" is nothing more than a crass marketing gimmick, concocted by war propagandists who have been lying to the country for the last four years about Iraq, to justify to an anti-war populace why we must continue our occupation. And while Fred Hiatt and his Extremely Serious and Sober Beltway War Supporting Comrades are too awash in desperate self-interest to see it, Americans themselves are not fooled by that tactic in the slightest.

It has been three months since the President unveiled his Glorious Surge Plan and Americans want out of Iraq today more than ever before. But as Paul Krugman put it today: "Beltway insiders [] still don't seem to realize how overwhelmingly the public has turned against President Bush. . . . The public hates this war, no longer has any trust in Mr. Bush's leadership and doesn't believe anything the administration says."

It is true that our system of government is not a direct democracy whereby every policy must, at every given moment, be matched up with the views of a majority of Americans. Representative democracy means that elected officials make decisions which sometimes can -- and sometimes should -- deviate from the prevailing views of the majority. That is all fair and true enough.

But the gulf has now become enormous and long-standing -- really, fundamental -- between (a) the actions and beliefs of our opinion-making Beltway elite and the "small but powerful" band of neoconservative/AEI/warmongering radicals whom they venerate and follow, and (b) the entrenched, well-considered and pervasive beliefs of the American populace about this war and Middle East militarism generally.

Americans have long ago abandoned this war and want out, and they made that as clear as can be in the last election. But The Weekly Standard/AEI faction and Fred Hiatt could not care less about any of that. The former has a Middle East agenda which outweighs all, while the latter has what it believes to be wisdom far superior to (and more Serious than) the views of the dirty and ignorant masses -- "wisdom" which, in reality, is merely a disguise for rank self-interest in wanting to conceal how terribly and tragically wrong they were about this war.

Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com

You Tell 'em, Lee

You might think I'm getting senile, that I've gone off my rocker, and maybe I have. But someone has to speak up. I hardly recognize this country anymore. The President of the United States is given a free pass to ignore the Constitution, tap our phones, and lead us to war on a pack of lies. Congress responds to record deficits by passing a huge tax cut for the wealthy (thanks, but I don't need it). The most famous business leaders are not the innovators but the guys in handcuffs. While we're fiddling in Iraq, the Middle East is burning and nobody seems to know what to do. And the press is waving pom-poms instead of asking hard questions. That's not the promise of America my parents and yours traveled across the ocean for. I've had enough. How about you?

I'll go a step further. You can't call yourself a patriot if you're not outraged. This is a fight I'm ready and willing to have.

My friends tell me to calm down. They say, "Lee, you're eighty-two years old. Leave the rage to the young people." I'd love to—as soon as I can pry them away from their iPods for five seconds and get them to pay attention. I'm going to speak up because it's my patriotic duty. I think people will listen to me. They say I have a reputation as a straight shooter. So I'll tell you how I see it, and it's not pretty, but at least it's real. I'm hoping to strike a nerve in those young folks who say they don't vote because they don't trust politicians to represent their interests. Hey, America, wake up. These guys work for us.

More excerpts from Lee Iacocca's new book at Borders

Those "Lost" e-mails

As you may have heard by now, some at the White House, including (and of course most importantly) Karl Rove, decided some time ago to circumvent standard practices by using RNC e-mail accounts (as opposed to legally mandated, archived White House accounts) for business. And now, lo and behold, millions of them have reportedly been "lost".

Needless to say, this is going to further fuel Congressional investigations, and Mark Kleiman makes a good, related point:

There's a law requiring that all White House emails be archived. But apparently the Bushies decided that they could just go ahead and delete emails concerning public business sent from their White House offices. The RNC, like any properly-run racketeering enterprise, deletes all emails after 30 days; that makes crimes harder to prosecute, without having any other obvious justification.

Naturally, it's going to be very hard for even this White House to claim "executive privilege" over communications nominally not sent from the Executive Office of the President in the first place. That just wouldn't pass the giggle test.

But now that some at least of the actual emails have disappeared, the two Judiciary committees have an even stronger case than they had before for demanding live public testimony under oath from anyone who had such an account, including especially Karl Rove. Somehow I doubt there would be much public sympathy for him if the House or Senate Sergeant-at-Arms finally gave him his long-delayed frog-march.

It's crucial to get Karl and the rest of his playmates under oath as soon as possible, while they're still unsure which of their emails might be recoverable. That way they won't have carte blanche to lie.

Mark's site

John Mccain: When in a Hole, Keep Digging!

I mean really, McCain's "It's perfectly safe in Baghdad, so I think I'll take a stroll (while wearing body armor, and with 100 heavily armed soldiers and helicopters accompanying me)" moment might have been analogous to Dukakis' famous "I'll bet I'd look tough in a tank" gaffe, but his efforts to rationalize the enormous blunder are simultaneously pathetic and hilarious (which, by the way, is not an easy double to pull off!).

Jonathan Schwarz has the best take:

Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain said he would have taken his tour of an Iraqi market last week even if he had not been accompanied by heavily armed U.S. soldiers.

McCain said he would have walked through a central Baghdad market without the military protection, but the top U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, had recommended the armed escort.

"I'm not notorious for being nervous about going anywhere," said McCain. "I'll gladly go almost anywhere in the world, under any circumstances, but I did respond and do what Gen. Petraeus asked me to do."

Other things John McCain wanted to do, but that wuss General Petraeus stopped him from trying:

1. Defeat entire Iraq insurgency, armed only with a bolo knife

2. Walk naked through Baghdad, wearing Arabic sign reading, "Dear kidnappers: My family is incredibly wealthy and loves to pay ransoms"

3. Die and be reincarnated as an Iraqi

Jonathan's Tiny Revolution

The Phony – and important – voter fraud issue

Lurking in the background of the U.S. Attorney purge scandal is the claim by the DOJ that the some of the firings of the attorneys were based on their lack of headway (or effort) in prosecuting voter fraud cases. Well, the sordid truth of the matter is that this was a phony (and disgustingly self-serving) issue to begin with, and the pressure emanated from – where else? – Karl Rove's office in The White House.

Josh Marshall has more:

As those of you who follow this issue know, the vast number of the claims about 'voter fraud' are based on poorly kept voter rolls. Joe Smith is registered to vote in New Jersey and New York! The small print is that he lived in New Jersey but then moved to New York. The election board in New Jersey just hasn't taken him off the rolls yet. It may sound like I'm joking. But most of the scare stories about 'voter fraud' are just as stupid as that example.

At TPMmuckraker at the moment, we're giving a very close look to the 'voter fraud' claims in Wisconsin that Karl Rove was so interested in. GOP activists were incredibly disappointed and angry when the US Attorney in Milwaukee brought only a tiny handful of prosecutions, after the activists had charged a massive conspiracy to steal the 2004 elections from Republicans. But the government actually lost a stunningly high percentage of even those cases because they were so weak.

Cynthia C. Alicea, 25, was indicted for double-voting. The evidence was that election officials found she'd registered to vote twice. She was acquited because it turned out election officials told her to fill out another card because the first one had been filled out wrong. Pretty lurid stuff. There was no evidence she'd ever voted twice. The other three people indicted in Milwaukee for double voting were acquited too.

Out of the tiny number of bona fide voter fraud cases, the great majority fall into two categories. The first are cases where workers hired in voter registration drives appear to sign up non-existent people to get paid more money from the sponsors of the drive. The actual examples of this are exceedingly rare. But since the people don't exist, no one ever shows up to vote in their name.

The second are felons or parolees who either register to vote or actually vote, in most cases not knowing they're not eligible to vote.

Read the full post at Josh Marshall's TPM

Sy Hersh, Then and Now

On May 29th, 1975, an aide to then-White House chief of staff Donald Rumsfeld sat down with a yellow legal pad and in careful longhand sketched out a list of possible responses to a damaging investigative report in The New York Times. "Problem," the aide wrote. "Unauthorized disclosure of classified national security information by Sy Hersh and the NYT." He then laid out five options, ranging from the most ominous (an FBI investigation of the newspaper and a grand jury indictment) to the least offensive ("Discuss informally with NYT" and "Do nothing"). Number three on the list, however, read, "Search warrant: to go after Hersh papers in his apt."

The note's author? A viper-mean Beltway apparatchik named Dick Cheney, who was making his name doing damage control for the Republican White House after the Watergate disaster. Coming so soon after Nixon was burned at the public stake for similar targeting of political enemies, the Cheney memo was proof that the next generation of GOP leaders had emerged from the Watergate scandal regretting only one thing: getting caught.

This year, an almost identical note in Cheney's same tight-looped, anal script appeared as a key piece of evidence in the trial of another powerful White House aide, Scooter Libby. The vice president's handwritten ruminations on how best to dispose of an Iraq War critic named Joe Wilson are an eerie reminder of how little has changed in America in the past three decades. Then as now, we have been dragged into a bloody massacre in the Third World, paying the bill for the operation with the souls and bodies of the next generation of our young people. It is the same old story, and many of the same people are once again in charge.

But some of the same people are on the other side, too. In the same week that Libby was convicted in a Washington courthouse, Seymour Hersh outlined the White House's secret plans for a possible invasion of Iran in The New Yorker. As amazing as it is that Cheney is still walking among us, a living link to our dark Nixonian past, it's even more amazing that Hersh is still the biggest pain in his ass, publishing accounts of conversations that seemingly only a person hiding in the veep's desk drawer would be privy to. "The access I have -- I'm inside," Hersh says proudly. "I'm there, even when he's talking to people in confidence."

America's pre-eminent investigative reporter of the last half-century, Hersh broke the story of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam and was on hand, nearly four decades later, when we found ourselves staring back at the same sick face in the mirror after Abu Ghraib. At age seventy, he clearly still loves his job. During a wide-ranging interview at his cramped Washington office, Hersh could scarcely sit still, bouncing around the room like a kindergartner to dig up old articles, passages from obscure books and papers buried in his multitudinous boxes of files. A hopeless information junkie, he is permanently aroused by the idea that corruption and invisible power are always waiting to be uncovered by the next phone call. Somewhere out there, They are still hiding the story from Us -- and that still pisses Hersh off.

Read Matt Taibbi's excellent interview of Hersh in The Rolling Stone

Deja Vu of the worst kind

It has an all-too-familiar ring to it.

A crisis area – in this case, the Middle East – finds itself in desperate need of a peace process capable of tamping down the forces of violence and destabilization which the United States itself has played a central role in unleashing.

Regional efforts at diplomacy – in this case, led by Saudi Arabia – gain some momentum but are frustrated by die-hard hawks in a U.S. administration. While increasingly on the defensive both at home and abroad, they are determined to carry through their strategy of isolating and destabilizing a hostile target – in this case, Syria – despite its oft-repeated eagerness to engage Washington and its regional allies.

Sensing an increasingly dangerous impasse, the Democratic speaker of the House of Representatives – in this case, Nancy Pelosi, backed by a growing bipartisan consensus that the administration's intransigence will further reduce already-waning U.S. influence in the region – tries to encourage regional peace efforts by engaging the target directly.

But, worried that her quest might actually gain momentum, administration hawks – in this case, led by Deputy National Security Adviser Elliott Abrams and Vice President Dick Cheney – accuse the speaker of undermining the president and, working through obliging editorial writers at the Washington Post, among other sympathetic media, including, of course, the Wall Street Journal, attack her for "substitut[ing] her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president."

If that scenario sounds familiar, your foreign policy memory dates back at least to 1987, when, despite intensified regional peacemaking efforts for which Costa Rican President Oscar Arias won that year's Nobel Peace Prize, the Ronald Reagan administration was persisting in its efforts to isolate and overthrow the Sandinista government in Nicaragua.

Read Jim Lobe's full piece at antiwar.com

Par for the Course

About five years ago I had a visit with Syrian President Bashar Al Asad, a visit when he told me that his intelligence services had uncovered a plot by Al Qaeda that would have killed American servicemen in the Middle East. He turned over the information to the U.S., which was then able to stop the operation, saving the lives of the Americans who were being targeted.

When I asked him what operation that was, he replied that, "The Americans asked me not to talk about it, but if they keep calling us a terrorist state, I will talk about it."

After I left his office, I asked the U.S. Ambassador to Syria if what he had said was true. His reply was that not only was it true, but that President Asad had been able to stop more than one Al Qaeda attack on American interests.

Those days are gone now, the heavy handed bad-mouthing of Syria by George W. Bush causing Syria to completely stop its cooperation. Despite the results of that incompetence on the part of the Bush Administration, the denunciations by Bush have continued unabated. Bush and his people have been so anxious to please Israel that what might be good for America is no longer the basis for American actions in the Middle East.

Read the rest of former U.S. Senator Jim Abourezk's piece at Counterpunch

Does Israel want peace?

Entire generations grew up here weaned on self-deception and doubt about the likelihood of achieving peace with our neighbors. In our younger days, David Ben-Gurion told us that if he were only able to meet with Arab leaders, he would have brought us peace in his time. Israel has demanded direct negotiations as a matter of principle and Israelis have derived great pride from the fact that their daily focus on "peace" has concealed their state's lofty ambitions. We were told that there was no partner for peace and that the ultimate ambition of the Arabs is to bring about our destruction. We burned the portraits of "the Egyptian tyrant" at our bonfires on Lag Ba'omer, and were convinced that all blame for the lack of peace lied with our enemies.

After that came the occupation, followed by terror, Yassir Arafat, the failed second Camp David Summit and the rise of Hamas to power, and we were sure, always sure, that it was all their fault. In our wildest dreams, we wouldn't have believed that the day would come when the entire Arab world would extend its hand in peace and Israel would brush away the gesture. It would have been even crazier to imagine that this Israeli refusal would have been blamed on not wanting to enrage domestic public opinion.

The world has been turned upside down and it is Israel that stands at the forefront of refusal. The policy of refusal of a select few, a vanguard of the extreme, has now become the official policy of Jerusalem. In his Passover interviews, Olmert will tell us that, "The Palestinians stand at the crossroads of a historic decision," but people stopped taking him seriously a long time ago. The historic decision is ours, and we are fleeing from this crossroads and from these initiatives as if from death itself.

Terror, used as the ultimate excuse for Israeli refusal, only helps Olmert keep reciting, ad nauseum, "If they [the Palestinians] don't change, don't fight terror and don't adhere to any of their obligations, then they will never extract themselves from their unending chaos." As though the Palestinians haven't taken measures against terrorism, as though Israel is the one to determine what their obligations are, as though Israel isn't to blame for the unending chaos Palestinians suffer under the occupation.

Israel makes a point of setting prerequisites and believes it has an exclusive right to do so. But, time and time again, Israel avoids the most basic prerequisite for any just peace - an end to the occupation. Of all the questions asked during his Passover interviews, no one bothered to ask Olmert why he didn't react with excitement to the recent Arab initiatives, without preconditions? The answer: real estate. The real estate of the settlements.

Gideon Levy's full editorial in Haaretz

And the hits keep coming...

A secret FBI intelligence unit helped detain a group of war protesters in a downtown Washington parking garage in April 2002 and interrogated some of them on videotape about their political and religious beliefs, newly uncovered documents and interviews show.

For years, law enforcement authorities suggested it never happened. The FBI and D.C. police said they had no records of such an incident. And police told a federal court that no FBI agents were present when officers arrested more than 20 protesters that afternoon for trespassing; police viewed them as suspicious for milling around the parking garage entrance.

But a civil lawsuit, filed by the protesters, recently unearthed D.C. police logs that confirm the FBI's role in the incident. Lawyers for the demonstrators said the logs, which police say they just found, bolster their allegations of civil rights violations.

The probable cause to arrest the protesters as they retrieved food from their parked van? They were wearing black -- a color choice the FBI and police associated with anarchists, according to the police records.

FBI agents dressed in street clothes separated members to question them one by one about protests they attended, whom they had spent time with recently, what political views they espoused and the significance of their tattoos and slogans, according to interviews and court records.

The revelations, combined with protester accounts, provide the first public evidence that Washington-based FBI personnel used their intelligence-gathering powers in the District to collect purely political intelligence.

Filled with outrage yet?

Read the full article in the Washington Post

The FDA: Looking out for your health?

Much of the incalculable damage done by the Bush administration stems from the shameful politicization of government bodies which are supposed to protect the interests of the American public. The chief motivation for the Administration is that it has been able to reward and protect big businesses by stocking these organizations with loyal (and, as an aside, often inept) political soldiers.

The EPA, and its actions over the past six years, provides a powerful example of this dynamic, and the damage which it can cause. The other prime example is the FDA, which has been exposed in recent years as having arrived at a number of important decisions which were at odds with the best available science, but supportive of the Administration's political goals.

Here's a recent example:

The government proposed Tuesday relaxing its rules on labeling of irradiated foods and suggested it may allow some products zapped with radiation to be called "pasteurized."

The Food and Drug Administration said the proposed rule would require companies to label irradiated food only when the radiation treatment causes a material change to the product. Examples include changes to the taste, texture, smell or shelf life of a food.

The FDA also proposed letting companies use the term "pasteurized" to describe irradiated foods. To do so, they would have to show the FDA that the radiation kills germs as well as the pasteurization process does.

Think about that. The major food corporations want to sell more food, and know full well that many consumers are wary of food which has been irradiated. So they lobby for the option – an incredibly dishonest option – of substituting the term "pastuerized" for "irradiated". This would be an obvious non-starter in a world where the FDA was actually interested in protecting the consumer, but not in Bushworld.

What a disgrace.

Read the full report from CNN

Business as Usual (including shameful Democrats)

In medicine they call it "drug-seeking behavior." A guy shows up at three different regional hospital emergency rooms in the space of a month, each time complaining of severe but non-specific lower back pain. Suspiciously, he is well-versed in the various milligram dosages of commercial hydrocodone. Ask him to wait an extra hour in the exam room, he starts bouncing his knees, and his forehead starts to pour sweat ...

Does this man's back really hurt? Maybe it does. You have to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least the first time. But the moment that orgasmic smile flashes across his face as soon as you hand him his Oxy scrip, you have to wonder. Just like I'm wondering right now, after watching what looked very suspiciously like a carefully-orchestrated congressional vote-seeking charade, i.e. the recent "controversial" scheduled-withdrawal/Iraq-timetable vote in the Senate.

[snip]

As for everyone else -- specifically, the Democrats who sponsored and passed the timetable measure -- they benefited from the bill most directly, riding a crest of antiwar sentiment and setting the Democrats up as the party that will look the best in the eyes of frustrated, war-fatigued voters in 2008. But lost amid all of this antiwar posturing were a series of inconvenient truths. One was that the bill was always going to be meaningless because Bush was always going to veto it, there were never going to be enough votes to override the veto, and everybody knew there were never going to be enough votes to override the veto. The second is that the timetable measure was buried in an emergency spending bill to pay for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, a bill that ended up authorizing $122 billion in spending when the supposedly evil, warmongering, politically isolated Bush White House only asked for $103 billion. In other words, the outwardly combative Democratic leadership not only refused to do anything substantive to bring the troops home, it actually tossed Bush an extra $20 billion or for the war effort without prodding.

Read the full article by The Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi

Very Frightening Indeed

Did you know that 150 graduates of Regents University work for the Bush administration? Neither did I. Do you know anything about Regents University? Neither did I, until I came across this scary post by Digby. In the post, he includes the following quote from an article on Regents written by Chris Hayes for The American Prospect.

At a school designed explicitly to produce influential professionals, worldview plays an especially crucial role; it is the bridge from inner spiritual beliefs to public action in the professional sphere. It’s for this reason that Regent’s professors are required to integrate “biblical principles” into every subject area, and it’s the reason that law students take a class their first year in the Christian foundations of law. Regent Law School Dean Jeffrey Brauch calls the result a “JD-plus.” Students take the standard canon of legal education -- torts, property, constitutional law -- but supplement discussions of what the law is with discussions of what the Bible and Christian tradition say the law should be, reading Leviticus, the Gospel of Matthew, and Thomas Aquinas alongside their case law. The same model extends throughout Regent’s nine schools, which offer courses like “Redemptive Cinema” and “Church-based Counseling Programs,” while infusing standard professional training with insights and injunctions from the Judeo-Christian (read: Christian) tradition.

For Journalists, Iraq has been Worse than WWII

Iraq is the most dangerous place in the world for journalists. Along with names and dates, the Brussels Tribunal has listed the circumstances under which Iraqi media personnel have been killed since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in March 2003. This extremely credible report cites 195 as dead. If non-Iraqi media representatives are included, the figure goes beyond 200. Both figures are well in excess of the media fatalities suffered in Vietnam or during World War II.

The primary reason why reporting from Iraq is dangerous for all journalists is the horrific security situation. Iraqi journalists reporting from the streets are in perpetual danger. If any of the countless militias does not want a certain story made public, it will make sure that the journalist has filed his or her last story. Not to mention the scores of reporter deaths which have been the combined handiwork of the Iraqi government, occupation forces and/or criminal gangs.

Despite President Bush’s assertion that life in Iraq is improving, a senior Iraqi journalist was found dead in the capital on March 3, 2007. On the same day the body of the managing editor of Baghdad’s al-Safir newspaper, Jamal al-Zubaidi, was found shot in the head.

Read Dahr Jamail's full piece

Gitmo: an awful stain on the U.S.

And it is a stain which will, at best, take decades to erase from the consciousness of the rest of the world. Fro. Eugene Robinson's column in the Washington Post:

On Friday, the Defense Department released a heavily redacted transcript of a March 14 hearing, held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to determine whether Nashiri should be classified as an "enemy combatant." I apologize for resorting to cliche, but the only way to describe this amazing, infuriating document is to call it Orwellian. Reading it gives you the chills.

None of the members of the military tribunal sitting in judgment is named. The officer serving as Nashiri's "personal representative" likewise is not named. Unclassified evidence is presented in summary -- an unnamed "recorder" reads a document quoting statements by witnesses that attest to Nashiri's involvement in the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, in which 224 people died, and the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole, which killed 17 U.S. sailors. The witnesses are not present, so, of course, there is no opportunity to challenge their statements.

Nashiri's representative, a lieutenant commander in the Navy, presents a stunning response: "The Detainee states that he was tortured into confession and once he made a confession his captors were happy and they stopped torturing him. Also, the Detainee states that he made up stories during the torture in order to get it to stop."

Robinson's full column

TruLy Breathtaking

Various Republican candidates attended a meeting of Club for Growth, and afterwards, National Review's Ramesh Ponnuru spoke to Cato Institute's President Ed Crane about what they said. This brief report from Ponnuru is simply extraordinary:

Crane asked if Romney believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens with no review. Romney said he would want to hear the pros and cons from smart lawyers before he made up his mind.

Mitt Romeny can't say -- at least not until he engages in a careful and solemn debate with a team of "smart lawyers" -- whether, in the United States of America, the President has the power to imprison American citizens without any opportunity for review of any kind. But in today's Republican Party, Romney's openness to this definitively tyrannical power is the moderate position. Ponnuru goes on to note:

Crane said that he had asked Giuliani the same question a few weeks ago. The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently.

It sounds like Giuliani is positioning himself in this race as the "compassionate authoritarian" -- "Yes, of course I have the power to imprison you without charges or review of any kind, but as President, I commit to you that I intend (no promises) to 'use this authority infrequently.'"

Two of the three leading Republican candidates for President either embrace or are open to embracing the idea that the President can imprison Americans without any review, based solely on the unchecked decree of the President. And, of course, that is nothing new, since the current Republican President not only believes he has that power but has exercised it against U.S. citizens and legal residents in the U.S. -- including those arrested not on the "battlefield," but on American soil.

What kind of American isn't just instinctively repulsed by the notion that the President has the power to imprison Americans with no charges? And what does it say about the current state of our political culture that one of the two political parties has all but adopted as a plank in its platform a view of presidential powers and the federal government that is -- literally -- the exact opposite of what this country is?

As Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson wrote in his concurring opinion in Brown v. Allen, 344 U.S. 443, 533 (1953):

Executive imprisonment has been considered oppressive and lawless since John, at Runnymede, pledged that no free man should be imprisoned, dispossessed, outlawed, or exiled save by the judgment of his peers or by the law of the land. The judges of England developed the writ of habeas corpus largely to preserve these immunities from executive restraint.

And another lefty, subversive, Chamberlain-like appeaser whined:

"I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution" --

Thomas Jefferson to Thomas Paine, 1789. ME 7:408, Papers 15:269.

Read Glenn Greenwald's full post at Salon.com

The U.S. Attorney Scandal and Beyond

Scott Horton reviews the attorney purge scandal, then reminds us of an even more corrosive perversion of our system of justice.

The prosecutors selected for discharge come from "battleground states" which will be key to the 2008 presidential election: New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, Michigan, Washington and Arkansas. This is no coincidence. Shortly after the 2006 Congressional election, Karl Rove, licking his wounds over a serious defeat, indicated in a speech to Republican lawyers that the public perception of scandal surrounding GOP law-makers was key to that loss. Rove promised he would do something about it. Within a few days, a move to cashier these prosecutors was underway. It is tied to a plan to use their offices to go after Democrats, whether a basis existed or not, and to pursue a voter suppression program focused on prospective Democrats. In other words, it's pure politics. Not high politics in the sense that Aristotle uses the term. But the crude gutter politics of the partisan hack. This sort of politics is not the exclusive province of one party. But over the last years, one party has exercised a monopoly on political power, and this appears to have led to a particularly virulent strain of political hackery.

Standing alone, this incident would be cause for grave concern. But it's just one aspect of a far broader crisis in which our country is enmeshed. The crisis has its start in the decision to introduce torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment - in contravention of 230 years of US military tradition, stretching back to George Washington's order after the battle of Trenton. Gonzales had a key role in this process as well, backed up by Cheney's chief-of-staff, David Addington and the now ever-present John Yoo. They tell us that they did this to insure that the president, as commander-in-chief, would have all the tools at his disposal that he might need to fight a war against terror. But if we strip the varnish off that, there are unmistakably unsavory elements underneath: one is a recognition that torture is a crime, and the second is a desire to enlist it into the president's arsenal notwithstanding what the law says.

[snip]

Recently a friend of mine who works with the Afghan Government shared with me some intelligence the Afghans had gathered from a young man apprehended in connection with an attack using an improvised explosive device. The man had fled as a refugee to Pakistan. There he was seized by the Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence (a close collaborator of the CIA) and told that unless he participated in a planned bombing attack on NATO forces in the Afghan south, the Pakistanis would turn him over to the Americans, he would be taken to Guantánamo and tortured there for years on end. He agreed to participate. Interestingly he was not the only young Afghan to be captured with an account like this. Is the account true? The Afghans are convinced it is, and US intelligence apparently has credited it as well. So there you have it: come full circle. The image of Gitmo used to recruit people to perform acts of terror against us.

Read Horton's full piece at Jack Balkan's blog

The Nexus of Money and Political Power: TIME, Inc. Edition

The images above are of the current covers of TIME magazine. The one on the left, featuring the story Why We Should Teach The Bible in Public Schools, can be found in the U.S. The one on the right, featuring the damning story entitled Talibanistan, is what readers of the magazine will find in Europe, Asia, and the South Pacific.

TIME

Iraq's Oil; American blood-stained hands

As I've mentioned before, thought it obviously bears repeating, the U.S. has digracefully (and predictably) taken advantage of Iraq's oil wealth. The following was written by Michael Meacher, a current Labour MP (Member of Parliament) in the U.K., and former environment minister. And if you think that I was harsh in my lead-in, the title of his editorial is "The rape of Iraq's oil".

The recent cabinet agreement in Baghdad on the new draft oil law was hailed as a landmark deal bringing together the warring factions in the allocation of the country's oil wealth. What was concealed was that this is being forced through by relentless pressure from the US and will sow the seeds of intense future conflict, with serious knock-on impacts on the world economy.

The draft law, now before the Iraqi parliament, sets up "production sharing partnerships" to allow the US and British oil majors to extract Iraqi oil for up to 30 years. While Iraq would retain legal ownership of its oil, companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP that invest in the infrastructure and refineries would get a large share of the profits.

No other Middle Eastern oil producer has ever offered such a hugely lucrative concession to the big oil companies, since Opec has always run its oil business through tightly-controlled state companies. Only Iraq in its present dire condition, dependent on US troops for the survival of the government, lacks the bargaining capacity to resist.

Meacher's full piece at The Guardian (U.K.)

Walcott at his best

Substance and – need I even say it? – style.

Congressional Democrats ought to form their own ballet company--that's the counsel coming from the Washington sages this Sunday. When Democrats were in the minority, they were dismissed and mocked as ineffectual, irrelevant, and directionless. Now that Democrats chair committees and wield gavels, the Beltway punditry want them to rise on tiptoe and tread gingerly through the maze of mousetraps the pundits have scattered across the floor. From the ultimate concern troll to Egbert the Egghead to Noron today on Chris Matthews' show, the message is that Democrats have to be "careful" not to "overreach" and "go too far." If I could trademark the phrase "The Democrats need to be careful...," I could retire in a few years to Cape May and build bat houses for needy bats. For six years we've had no Congressional oversight whatsoever over the rot and ruin of the Bush administration, and as soon as the first flexings of oversight are made, we get a plethora of Poloniuses dribbling advice (and as Saul Bellow reminded us, one of the nice things about Hamlet is that Polonius gets stabbed).

JW's full post

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