MY POV

IF YOU'RE NOT OUTRAGED, YOU'RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION!

"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

Benjamin Franklin

How Bush really feels about you.

"If there were such a thing as Intelligent Design, we wouldn't have George W. Bush."

Christy Marx

The Mars Society

"Should any political party attempt to abolish social security, unemployment insurance and eliminate labor laws and farm programs, you would not hear of that party again in our political history. There is a tiny splinter group, of course, that believes that you can do these things. Among them are a few Texas oil millionaires, and an occasional politician or businessman from other areas. Their number is negligible and they are stupid."

Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890-1969)
34th President of the USA
a Republican, in a letter written to his brother on November 8, 1954

"...The Fascist State organizes the nation, but leaves a sufficient margin of liberty to the individual; the latter is deprived of all useless and possibly harmful freedom, but retains what is essential; the deciding power in this question cannot be the individual, but the State alone...."

Benito Mussolini

"I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country... Corporations have been enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money-power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

Abraham Lincoln
November 12, 1864

"Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided man."

Martin Luther King Jr., 1963

"CORPORATION, n. An ingenious device for obtaining individual profit without individual responsibility."

Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary

"The purpose of separation of church and state is to keep forever from these shores the ceaseless strife that has soaked the soil of Europe in blood for centuries."

James Madison
(1751-1836)
4th President of the United States

"Wherever they burn books they will also, in the end, burn human beings."

Heinrich Heine
Almansor, 1823

"A fanatic is one who can't change his mind and won't change the subject."

Sir Winston Churchill
(1874-1965)

"Why of course the people don't want war. Why should some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war: neither in Russia, nor in England, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.

Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the peacemakers for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country."

Hermann Goering, Nazi Reichsmarschall

"Authoritarian societies inevitably crumble because they silence the critics who could save them from errors of blind hubris. Dissent is not a luxury to be indulged in the best of times, but rather an obligation of free people, particularly when the very notion of dissent is unpopular."

Robert Scheer

"FASCISM: a system of government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically through the merging of state and business leadership together with belligerent nationalism."

American Heritage Dictionary

Cowardice asks the question - is it safe?
Expediency asks the question - is it politic?
Vanity asks the question - is it popular?
But conscience asks the question - is it right?
And there comes a time when one must take a position that is
neither safe, nor politic, nor popular; but one must take it
because it is right.

Dr. Martin Luther King

"My life is my message."

Gandhi

Posted: 29 Jan. 2006

Broadcaster says serious news at risk
By JAN SJOSTROM , Daily News Arts Editor

Former CNN 'NewsNight' anchor Aaron Brown said important issues, such as the war in Iraq, are being clouded over by 'mud-wrestling' that skirts substance. Brown spoke Tuesday at The Society of the Four Arts.

The anchorman whose boss once characterized him as ice compared with his successor's fire was anything but chilly in the impassioned speech he delivered Tuesday at The Society of the Four Arts.

"Truth no longer matters in the context of politics and, sadly, in the context of cable news," said Aaron Brown, whose four-year period as anchor of CNN's NewsNight ended in November, when network executives gave his job to Anderson Cooper in a bid to push the show's ratings closer to front-runner Fox News.

Important issues, such as the prosecution of the war in Iraq at home and abroad, are being clouded over by "mud-wrestling" that skirts substance, he said. Consider what he called "the swift-boating of John Murtha," the Democratic congressman whose war record was smeared when he called for an exit strategy in Iraq. "Cable didn't search for the truth, but engaged in mock debates pitting those making the charges against Murtha's defenders," he said.

READ THE ARTICLE.

From Grist on-line magazine.

Bush admin plans to fund new dawn for nuclear power

Like an atomic Dr. Frankenstein determined to reanimate the corpse of the civilian nuclear-power industry, the Bush administration intends to allot $250 million in fiscal year 2007 to researching new ways to reprocess spent nuclear fuel -- technology largely abandoned in the 1970s as too dangerous. The funding is seen as a down payment on billions in future federal spending for nuclear power, with the nuclear industry in position to reap millions of dollars in profits as a result. The fuel-reprocessing scheme is part of a larger Bush plan -- thus far cheerily termed the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership -- that would allow the industry to sell smallish reactors and fuel to developing nations as long as they send their spent fuel back to the U.S. for reprocessing. The administration quietly sent two senior officials to Japan, Russia, and other countries last week to sell the initiative, and Bush may mention it in next week's State of the Union address.

Ethanol decent on efficiency but not on greenhouse gases, study finds

The heated debate over biofuels took another sharp turn this week: New research in the journal Science claims that replacing fossil fuels with corn-based ethanol is energy-efficient (contrary to some previous studies), but doesn't do much to cut greenhouse-gas pollution. Researchers from UC-Berkeley determined that ethanol results in a net energy gain of about 20 percent, but that the pollution generated in processing the corn offsets most of ethanol's gains in greenhouse-gas emissions. Cornell University scientist David Pimentel -- author of several studies questioning ethanol's energy efficiency -- disagrees with the findings, saying they failed to factor in farm machinery and overestimated the value of corn byproducts. But all agree that the future of ethanol is not corn, but higher-cellulose plants like switchgrass and willow trees -- news the powerful agribusiness and corn lobbies will no doubt try to play down.

Posted: 16 Jan. 2006

From Organic Consumers. Regarding the first story, note that MSG has also been shown to cause obesity and can create a form of addiction for foods that contain it.

STUDY: JUNK FOOD ADDITIVES STOP NERVE CELL GROWTH
Mixing common additives, such as aspartame an artificial sweetener, Brilliant Blue, Quinoline Yellow or monosodium glutamate (MSG) causes nerve cell damage, say researchers at the University of Liverpool. The results from a two-year study were recently published in the journal Toxicological Sciences. The researchers found the additives were much more potent in combination with each other than on their own. Mice were exposed to concentrations of additive combinations relative to what a child would receive in an average snack and drink. Researchers were surprised to see the additives interfered with nerve signaling systems and actually stopped the nerve cells from growing. Aspartame is commonly found in diet drinks, candies and flavored medicines, while MSG is frequently found in chips, processed cheese and many processed foods.

Learn more: http://www.organicconsumers.org/toxic/msg010306.cfm

If you live in California, please support this effort. Hemp is a tremendously beneficial crop and was a primary agricultural product of the United States right up to the 1950s.

ALERT: CALIFORNIA COULD BE FIRST US STATE TO RETURN TO INDUSTRIAL HEMP FARMING
A bill in the California Assembly could bring traditional hemp farming back to the United States. Although industrial hemp is commonly used for making products in the U.S., it cannot be legally grown by domestic farmers. These laws contrast early America when farmers were legally bound to grow hemp during the Colonial Era and Early Republic, due to the plant's versatility. Often confused with marijuana, industrial hemp is actually a very different plant and contains insignificant levels of THC (tetrahyrdocannabinol), the chemical in marijuana that results in psychotropic effects. Industrial hemp, which can be grown easily without the use of pesticides or synthetic fertilizers, can be used to make paper, textiles, bio-fuel, nutrition supplements and fiberboards. Hemp fields clean the air and the soil, and hemp products can be recycled and composted. Industrial hemp production has been illegal in California since 1972. Now there is a bill that would let farmers grow the hemp that is currently imported from other countries. AB 1147, the California Industrial Hemp Farming Act, must pass out of the Assembly by the end of January in order to be considered by the Senate.

If you are a California resident, please take action now: http://www.organicconsumers.org/cahemp.htm

I'll keep saying it, we need to impeach the bastards.

Proof Bush Deceived America
Ray McGovern

James Risen’s State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration, may hold bigger secrets than the disclosure that President George W. Bush authorized warrantless eavesdropping on Americans.

Risen’s book also confirms the most damning element of the British Cabinet Office memos popularly called the “Downing Street memos;” namely, that “the intelligence and the facts were being fixed around the policy.” The result is that it is no longer credible to maintain that the failures in the Iraqi intelligence were the product of a broken intelligence community. The Bush administration deliberately fabricated the case against Iraq, lying to Congress and the American people along the way.

READ THE REST.

Abramoff Scandal Turns a Spotlight on the Charitable Foundation Dodge
Arianna Huffington

Like a bad meal endlessly repeating, the gaseous belch of the Abramoff scandal keeps offering up odiferous reminders of the sorry state of our politics.

It's now clear that this is the political equivalent of the corporate corruption I wrote about in Pigs at the Trough. Bill Frist and Tom DeLay are the Beltway incarnations of John Rigas and Dennis Kozlowski, the Adelphia and Tyco CEOs who used their companies as their personal piggy banks -- and have been sentenced to serious jail time because of it. I see the same self-dealing, the same hubris, the same mentality that says, I can do anything I want, say anything I want, give money and high-paying jobs to anyone I want.

The widening Abramoff affair has put the spotlight back on the dominant role Big Money continues to play in our politics -- and of how politicians and their lobbyist pals keep coming up with new and nefarious ways of selling access and influence to the highest bidder.

One of the sleaziest of these is the charitable-foundation dodge. This shockingly legal scam allows those looking to game the system a number of ways to do so. First and foremost, when politicians align themselves with charities, it allows special interests to donate unlimited sums of money and curry favor while acting as if they are doing it out of the goodness of their souls instead of the usual oily self-interest. What's more, because they are giving to "charity," these non-political (wink, wink) donations are tax-deductible. And, thanks to these charities' 501 (c)(3) status, donations to them do not have to be reported -- allowing the influence-buyers to remain in the shadows. It's a win-win-win for shady politicians, lobbyists, and their big-buck backers -- and a lose-lose-lose for our democracy.

READ THE REST.

Yet another utterly fake photo op from the Bushies.

Title: Reach Out and Touch No One
Source: New York Times
Author: MAUREEN DOWD

Reach Out and Touch No One

Doing the math, you've got to figure that the 12 wise men and one wise woman had about 30 seconds apiece to say their piece to the president about Iraq, where vicious assaults this week have killed almost 200 and raised U.S. troop fatalities to at least 2,189.

It must have been like a performance by the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which boils down the great plays and books to their essence. Proust is "I like cookies." Othello raps that he left Desdemona "all alona, didn't telephona." "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey" condense into "The Idiodity." "Henry V" is "A king's gotta do what a king's gotta do," and "Antony and Cleopatra" is "Never get involved in Middle Eastern affairs."

t may seem disturbing at first, that with several hundreds of years' worth of foreign policy at his elbows, and a bloody, thorny mess in Iraq, Mr. Bush would devote mere moments to letting some fresh air into his House of Pain.

Sure, he has A.D.D. But he just spent six straight days mountain-biking and brush clearing in Crawford. He couldn't devote 60 minutes to getting our kids home rather than just a few for a "Message: I Care" photo-op faking sincerity?

"We all went into the bubble and came out," one of the wise men noted.

READ THE REST.

Posted: 12 Jan. 2006

From Grist on-line magazine.

Bush administration opens up Alaska wildlife habitat to drilling

The Bush administration's lust for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge having gone unrequited, it's going to stick its derricks in some sloppy seconds: The Department of Interior is opening up hundreds of thousands of acres of other Alaskan wildlife habitat to drilling. The land around Teshekpuk Lake, about 200 miles west of the refuge, is part of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska; it may contain up to 2 billion barrels of "economically recoverable" oil and 3.5 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. The area is so rich in migratory waterfowl and caribou that even the Reagan administration protected it, as did the Bush the Elder and Clinton administrations. Staff at the Bureau of Land Management say the decision to clear the way for drilling was made at the behest of Vice President Dick Cheney's super-secretive energy task force, which never met an ecosystem it wouldn't treat like a two-bit hooker.


Algae being harnessed to combat climate change and other eco-woes

Consider the algae. Three years ago, Massachusetts Institute of Technology rocket scientist Isaac Berzin had an idea: use the slimy plants to clean up emissions from power plants. Today, at a power plant next to MIT, tubes of healthy algae slurp up 40 percent of carbon dioxide and 86 percent of nitrous oxide before power-plant emissions are released into the atmosphere. Not only that, but harvested algae will squeeze out a combustible biofuel. The right type of algae can produce 15,000 gallons of biodiesel per acre, compared to soybeans' measly 60 gallons. What to do with the dried algae flakes left over from biodiesel squeezing? Process them into ethanol. And -- wait for it -- Berzin claims that the whole shebang can make a profit. His company, GreenFuel Technologies, is currently conducting trials and hopes to be in full production by 2009. Not bad for a plant with just one cell.

From The Center for American Progress.

Excuses, Excuses

After two days of questioning from the Senate Judiciary Committee, many questions still remain unanswered about Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito. While Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX) said Alito has been not only "responsive, but...very forthcoming," the reality is that all of Alito's talking has contained little substance. "You know, we know very little more about Judge Alito now than we knew when the hearings began," said Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY). "He has talked in very broad generalities and said things that everyone would agree with and tells no one about his views." In his final day of testimony, Alito needs to stop his dodging and weaving tactics and be up front with the American public about his record.

AVOIDING QUESTIONS ON CRITICAL CASES: Alito, like Chief Justice John Roberts during his confirmation hearings, has refused to comment on his specific stance on abortion law because related cases are pending before the Supreme Court. "To do so [comment on abortion], he said, would be to say to future parties in abortion-related cases, 'If you bring your case before my court, I'm not even going to listen to you.'" But Alito doesn't seem fully committed to his strategy. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) pointed out, "You were willing to give your view on one man, one vote. And yet there are four case[s] pending in the court right now on one man, one vote. ... That's where I have a hard time. If you're willing to say that you believe one man, one vote is well settled and you agree with it, I have hard time understanding how you separate out Roe [and don't comment]."

RUNNING AWAY FROM THE PAST: Alito has continually tried to run away from 1985, instead of standing by his writings and actions. "You seemed to walk away from a lot of your own record," observed Sen. Herbert Kohl (D-WI). In a 1985 Justice Department job application Alito wrote, "I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." Even before the nomination hearings began, Alito tried to brush off his strong statements with weak excuses. In a 1985 memo to the Reagan administration's Solicitor General, Alito wrote that the current cases before the Supreme Court afforded them the "opportunity to advance the goals of overruling Roe v. Wade and, in the meantime, of mitigating its effects." Despite his own words in 1985, Alito has tried to convince senators that he never said them: "I did not advocate in the [1985] memo that an argument be made that Roe be overruled."

ALITO'S IGNORANCE DEFENSE: Alito has been unable (or unwilling) to answer senators' questions about his 14-year membership in a right-wing alumni organization, the Concerned Alumni of Princeton, which advocated excluding women and minorities from the university. Alito listed his Concerned Alumni membership in a 1985 job application to the Reagan Justice Department. In this week's hearings, Alito has offered no legitimate explanations for his membership and has relied on the ignorance defense: "I have wracked my memory about this issue, and I really have no specific recollection of that organization." But not all senators are not buying Alito's faulty memory. Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA)"expressed disbelief that Alito could recount details of each of his 67 dissents as a Third Circuit appellate court judge, but not his membership in Concerned Alumni of Princeton."

INCONSISTENCIES AND EXCUSES ABOUND: Alito has now offered three different reasons for his failure to recuse himself from a 2002 case involving the investment company Vanguard. Alito, who ruled in favor of the group, owned between $390,000 to $975,000 in Vanguard shares at the time and in his 1990 Senate confirmation hearings had promised to recuse himself from cases involving the company. Senators are becoming frustrated with Alito's excuses. "A number of us have been troubled by what we see as inconsistencies in some of the answers," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT). Alito has not clearly answered why he did not recuse himself in 2002, but he has given strong indication that he would not recuse himself from a case involving Vanguard if it came before the Supreme Court (and he continued to own shares in the company): "Well, under the Code of Judicial Conduct, I don’t believe that I am required to recuse myself in Vanguard cases." That answer contrasts with the answer he gave the day before, suggesting that in conflict of interest cases, his own personal standard is to "go beyond what the code of conduct for judges requires."


Under the Radar

HEALTH CARE -- 'WAL-MART BILL' BEING DEBATED IN MARYLAND THIS WEEK: Lawmakers in the Maryland House of Delegates are debating a bill this week that would require Wal-Mart to spend more on employee health care. "The legislation would require private companies with more than 10,000 employees in Maryland to spend at least 8 percent of payroll on employee health benefits or make a contribution to the state's insurance program for the poor. Wal-Mart is the only known employer that does not meet that requirement." Both the Maryland Senate and the House are deciding whether to override Gov. Bob Ehrlich's (R) earlier veto of the bill (for his part, Ehrlich has been trying to engage in revisionist history about why he vetoed the bill). By forcing Wal-Mart to offer more affordable health care coverage to its 17,000 Maryland employees, the bill would provide hope for workers like Cynthia Murray, who said, "I've worked at Wal-Mart for more than five years, and I still can't afford their health care. I know many of my co-workers can't afford it either." A recent poll indicated that 66 percent of Maryland residents support the bill.

ETHICS -- TEXAS TV STATIONS REFUSE TO AIR DELAY AD: "[F]our Houston television stations that sold airtime for a commercial criticizing U.S. Rep. Tom DeLay refused to air it Wednesday after objections from a DeLay lawyer." The 30-second ad lists the money and travel that DeLay allegedly received from Abramoff and calls on the lawmaker to resign from Congress. Backed by a series of facts, the ad also claims DeLay has taken "48 trips to golf resorts, 100 flights aboard company jets, 200 nights at world class resorts and hotels" while serving in Congress. DeLay attorney Donald McGahn threatened that any decision by the stations to air the ads would be "actionable." "Dallas attorney Joe Chumlea, who has handled several libel and defamation cases, said McGahn likely would not have had a strong legal case against stations running the ad because the Supreme Court provides broadcasters with the highest level of protection when it comes to political ads. Broadcasters can only be liable for damages if they air something that they know is false or recklessly ignore the fact that it could be. .. [S]omeone such as McGahn telling a broadcaster that an ad is. false doesn't meet the standard."

TAXES -- IRS FROZE TAXPAYER REFUNDS WITHOUT NOTICE OR DUE PROCESS: The National Taxpayer Advocate (NTA), who helps taxpayers sort out problems with the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), released a study this week that found IRS investigators "froze more than 120,000 taxpayers' refunds last year on suspicion of fraud without notifying the taxpayers or giving them a chance to respond." The report found that two-thirds of the affected taxpayers did not commit fraud, and "many of the returns were filed by low-income workers, including some who claimed the earned-income tax credit," a tax credit "designed to reduce poverty among the working poor." The NTA examined the IRS Questionable Refund Program that uses "data-mining" software to find possible fraud. "At a minimum, this procedure constitutes an extraordinary violation of fundamental taxpayer rights and fairness," Nina Olson of NTA said. "In our view, it may also constitute a violation of due process of law."

Posted: 11 Jan. 2006

From Grist on-line magazine.

Whole Foods makes record-setting wind-power purchase

Whole Foods Market, mega-purveyor of organic and free-range foodstuffs, plans to purchase a jaw-dropping 458 million kilowatt-hours of wind-energy credits. It will be the largest-ever such purchase in North America, enough to offset the entire company's projected energy use through 2006. The move will keep about 700 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions out of the atmosphere, according to the U.S. EPA, the equivalent of taking 60,000 cars off the road for a year or planting 90,000 acres of trees. Whole Foods is buying the credits from Boulder, Colo.-based broker Renewable Choice Energy. The purchase is not altruism, according to a Whole Foods director, but simply what the company's devoted customers expect. Says one outside strategist, "From a branding perspective, it's a stroke of genius." You listening, Safeway?


New study finds salvage logging bad for burned forests

The timber industry and Bush administration officials contend that salvage logging post-wildfire is the quickest path to reforestation, but a new study refutes that claim. Published in Science, it found that logging of burned trees after the 2002 Biscuit fire in Oregon -- the biggest wildfire that year in the U.S. -- killed about 70 percent of newly sprouted seedlings. After the Biscuit fire, enviro groups battled the Bush administration in federal court to limit salvage logging, but lost. Now greens hope the new study will help them make their case against bills in Congress that would speed up approval for salvage logging after wildfires.

Know the lies. The only way the Bush regime can get away with this is to keep telling the Big Lies.

Top 12 media myths and falsehoods on the Bush administration's spying scandal
from MediaMatters.org

Summary: Media Matters presents the top 12 myths and falsehoods promoted by the media on President Bush's spying scandal stemming from the recent revelation in The New York Times that he authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on domestic communications without the required approval of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court.

As The New York Times first revealed on December 16, President Bush issued a secret presidential order shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on international phone and email communications that originate from or are received within the United States, and to do so without the court approval normally required under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Facing increasing scrutiny, the Bush administration and its conservative allies in the media have defended the secret spying operation with false and misleading claims that have subsequently been reported without challenge across the media. So, just in time for the holidays, Media Matters for America presents the top myths and falsehoods promoted by the media on the Bush administration's spying scandal.

1: Timeliness necessitated bypassing the FISA court

Various media outlets have uncritically relayed President Bush's claim that the administration's warrantless domestic surveillance is justified because "we must be able to act fast ... so we can prevent new [terrorist] attacks." But these reports have ignored emergency provisions in the current law governing such surveillance -- FISA -- that allow the administration to apply to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a search warrant up to 72 hours after the government begins monitoring suspects' phone conversations. The existence of this 72-hour window debunks the argument that the administration had to bypass the law to avoid delay in obtaining a warrant. The fact that the administration never retroactively sought a warrant from the FISA court for its surveillance activities suggests that it was not the need to act quickly that prevented the administration from complying with the FISA statute, but, rather, the fear of being denied the warrant.

2: Congress was adequately informed of -- and approved -- the administration's actions

Conservatives have sought to defend the secret spying operation by falsely suggesting that the Bush administration adequately informed Congress of its actions and that Congress raised no objections. For example, on the December 19 broadcast of Westwood One's The Radio Factor, host Bill O'Reilly claimed that the NSA's domestic surveillance "wasn't a secret program" because "the Bush administration did keep key congressional people informed they were doing this." The claim was also featured in a December 21 press release by the Republican National Committee (RNC).

In fact, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have said that the administration likely did not inform them of the operation to the extent required by the National Security Act of 1947, as amended in 2001. Members of both parties have also said that the objections they did have were ignored by the administration and couldn't be aired because the program's existence was highly classified.

As The New York Times reported on December 21, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV), and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) have stated that they did not receive written reports from the White House on the surveillance operation, as required by the National Security Act:

The demand for written reports was added to the National Security Act of 1947 by Congress in 2001, as part of an effort to compel the executive branch to provide more specificity and clarity in its briefings about continuing activities. President Bush signed the measure into law on Dec. 28, 2001, but only after raising an objection to the new provision, with the stipulation that he would interpret it "in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority" to withhold information for national-security or foreign-policy reasons.

[I]n interviews, Mr. Hoekstra, Mr. Graham and aides to Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Reid all said they understood that while the briefings provided by [Vice President Dick] Cheney might have been accompanied by charts, they did not constitute written reports. The 2001 addition to the law requires that such reports always be in written form, and include a concise statement of facts and explanation of an activity's significance.

Further, Rockefeller recently released a copy of a letter he wrote to Cheney on July 17, 2003, raising objections to the secret surveillance operation. As the Times reported on December 20, Rockefeller said on December 19 that his concerns "were never addressed, and I was prohibited from sharing my views with my colleagues" because the briefings were classified. The December 21 Times report noted that House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said she too sent a letter to the Bush administration objecting to the secret surveillance operation, and that Graham alleged that he was never informed "that the program would involve eavesdropping on American citizens."

3: Warrantless searches of Americans are legal under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

Conservatives such as nationally syndicated radio host Rush Limbaugh and American Cause president Bay Buchanan have defended the administration by falsely claiming that the administration's authorization of domestic surveillance by the NSA without warrants is legal under FISA. In fact, FISA, which was enacted in 1978, contains provisions that limit such surveillance to communications "exclusively between foreign powers," specifically stating that the president may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order only if there is "no substantial likelihood" that the communications of "a United States person" -- a U.S. citizen or anyone else legally in the United States -- will be intercepted. Such provisions do not allow for the Bush administration's authorization of domestic surveillance of communications between persons inside the United States and parties outside the country.

FISA also allows the president and the attorney general to conduct surveillance without a court order for the purpose of gathering "foreign intelligence information" for "a period" no more than 15 days "following a declaration of war by the Congress." This provision does not permit Bush's conduct either, as he acknowledged that he had reauthorized the program more than 30 times since 2001, and said that the program is "reviewed approximately every 45 days."

READ THE REST.

I've been observing this for a long time, but here it is concisely laid out. It really is getting harder to survive.

The Middle Class on the Precipice
Rising financial risks for American families
by Elizabeth Warren

Elizabeth Warren is Gottlieb professor of law and faculty director of the Judicial Education Program. This article is based in part on “Rewriting the Rules: Families, Money, and Risk,” a paper written for the nonprofit Social Science Research Council (see http://privatizationofrisk.ssrc.org/Warren). Warren and her daughter, Amelia Warren Tyagi, are the authors of The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers Are Going Broke (see “The Middle-Class Trapdoor,” January-February 2004, page 10) and All Your Worth: The Ultimate Lifetime Money Plan.

During the past generation, the American middle-class family that once could count on hard work and fair play to keep itself financially secure has been transformed by economic risk and new realities. Now a pink slip, a bad diagnosis, or a disappearing spouse can reduce a family from solidly middle class to newly poor in a few months.

Middle-class families have been threatened on every front. Rocked by rising prices for essentials as men’s wages remained flat, both Dad and Mom have entered the workforce—a strategy that has left them working harder just to try to break even. Even with two paychecks, family finances are stretched so tightly that a very small misstep can leave them in crisis. As tough as life has become for married couples, single-parent families face even more financial obstacles in trying to carve out middle-class lives on a single paycheck. And at the same time that families are facing higher costs and increased risks, the old financial rules of credit have been rewritten by powerful corporate interests that see middle-class families as the spoils of political influence.

In just one generation, millions of mothers have gone to work, transforming basic family economics. The typical middle-class household in the United States is no longer a one-earner family, with one parent in the workforce and one at home full-time. Instead, the majority of families with small children now have both parents rising at dawn to commute to jobs so they can both pull in paychecks.

Scholars, policymakers, and critics of all stripes have debated the social implications of these changes, but few have looked at their economic impact. Today the median income for a fully employed male is $41,670 per year (all numbers are inflation-adjusted to 2004 dollars)—nearly $800 less than his counterpart of a generation ago. The only real increase in wages for a family has come from the second paycheck earned by a working mother. With both adults in the workforce full-time, the family’s combined income is $73,770—a whopping 75 percent higher than the median household income in the early 1970s. But the gain in income has an overlooked side effect: family risk has risen as well. Today’s families have budgeted to the limits of their new two-paycheck status. As a result, they have lost the parachute they once had in times of financial setback—a back-up earner (usually Mom) who could go into the workforce if the primary earner got laid off or fell sick. This “added-worker effect” could buttress the safety net offered by unemployment insurance or disability insurance to help families weather bad times. But today, a disruption to family fortunes can no longer be made up with extra income from an otherwise-stay-at-home partner.

Income risk has shifted in other ways as well. Incomes are less dependable today. Layoffs, outsourcing, and other workplace changes have trebled the odds of a significant interruption in a single generation.

The modern single-earner family trying to keep up an average lifestyle faces a 72 percent drop in discretionary income compared with its one-income counterpart of a generation ago.

In other words, today’s family has no margin for error. There is no leeway to cut back if one earner’s hours are cut or if the other gets sick. There is no room in the budget if someone needs to take off work to care for a sick child or an elderly parent. Their basic situation is far riskier than that of their parents a generation earlier. The modern American family is walking a high wire without a net.

READ THE REST.

Posted: 10 Jan. 2006

From Grist on-line magazine.

King Kong director campaigns to save wild gorillas

The original 1933 King Kong gave gorillas a bad rep and inspired an upsurge in gorilla hunting, but the director of the 2005 remake hopes to use his blockbuster's appeal to help keep the apes from going extinct. Peter Jackson is backing efforts by the International Gorilla Conservation Program to save Kong's smaller and less terrifying prototypes. Jackson's contributions include charity premieres of the film, which have raised $100,000, and plans for the King Kong DVD to include a documentary film about the mountain gorilla of central Africa. "Gorillas are truly amazing animals -- without them there wouldn't be entertainment like King Kong," says Jackson. Um ... true. Another good reason to protect gorillas is that all wild ones are considered endangered, some species critically so. Mountain gorillas could die out within the next few decades, scientists say.


Flame retardants are yet another toxic threat to polar bears

New research confirms that polar bears -- for years known to be victims of northward-spreading toxic substances -- are accumulating in their bodies worrying levels of flame retardants called polybrominated diphenyl ethers. The effects of this PBDE contamination are unknown, but similar chemicals are believed to be weakening the bears' immune systems, changing their bone structure, and skewing their sex hormones. According to research published in December in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, polar bears in eastern Greenland and Norway's Svalbard islands are the most highly contaminated of all Arctic populations. Scientists believe that most of the PBDEs are coming from northwestern Europe and the east coast of North America. In the U.S., they're widely used in manufacturing furniture, carpet padding, electronics, and plastics.


Green buildings, sustainability studies going mainstream on campus

More than 110 colleges and universities around the U.S. have or are building eco-friendly structures, saving on energy costs and attracting students who want to go to a school that "gets" being green. At Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, for example, students designed a green roof that now features prominently in class projects, and a recently constructed green dorm -- billed by school officials as the first in the country -- has become a living lab for students, architects, and engineers studying energy use and sustainable construction. Carnegie Mellon is integrating sustainability into coursework, and leading in a national effort to green up the nation's 1,500-odd engineering programs. The idea is "to take some of the ideas of sustainability out of the fringes and put them into the mainstream," says engineering professor and green advocate Cliff Davidson.

I've been reading about this for a long time. It's a danger of which most Americans seem utterly unaware. And China isn't the only country that owns a big chunk of us.

China Set To Reduce Exposure To Dollar
Move Would Probably Push Currency Down

By Peter S. Goodman
Washington Post Foreign Service

SHANGHAI, Jan. 9 -- China has resolved to shift some of its foreign exchange reserves -- now in excess of $800 billion -- away from the U.S. dollar and into other world currencies in a move likely to push down the value of the greenback, a high-level state economist who advises the nation's economic policymakers said in an interview Monday.

As China's manufacturing industries flood the world with cheap goods, the Chinese central bank has invested roughly three-fourths of its growing foreign currency reserves in U.S. Treasury bills and other dollar-denominated assets. The new policy reflects China's fears that too much of its savings is tied up in the dollar, a currency widely expected to drop in value as the U.S. trade and fiscal deficits climb.

China now boasts the world's second-largest cache of foreign exchange -- behind only Japan -- and is on pace to see its reserves climb past $1 trillion later this year. Even a slight diminishing of the dollar as a percentage of those holdings could exert significant pressure on the U.S. currency, many economists assert.

In recent years, the value of the dollar has been buoyed by major purchases of U.S. Treasury bills by Japan, China and oil-exporting countries -- a flow of capital that has kept interests rates relatively low in the United States and allowed Americans to keep spending even as debts mount. Some economists have long warned that if foreigners lose their appetite for American debt, the dollar would fall, interest rates would rise and the housing boom could burst, sending real estate prices lower.

READ THE REST.

Posted: 7 Jan. 2006

This is a couple of years old, but I urge you to read the entire interview and the man's book about the danger of our dependency on Saudi Arabian oil, and their financing of fundamentalist terrorism throughout the world. It remains relevant, in fact more relevant now than ever.

Robert Baer, Former CIA Case Officer and Author of "Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude."

Think About This: Whenever You Buy a Tank of Saudi Arabian Gas, You are Helping to Finance Terrorism.

BUZZFLASH: Let me begin by asking you, just to establish your background, you wrote a book called See No Evil, in which you talked about your career with the CIA. Can you explain a little bit more about what your background and areas of responsibility were with the CIA?

ROBERT BAER: I spent 21 years in the CIA as what’s called a case officer. That means that I went overseas and served overseas almost all the years I spent with the CIA, meeting with what we call agents. Those are foreigners who spy for the CIA. And you write up their reports and send them back to Washington. So I was a field officer, in short.

BUZZFLASH: Why do the Saudis finance terrorism? From reading your book and elsewhere, we deduce that there are probably two reasons. One is that they’re paying protection money. You set up the scenario, as you discussed earlier, that if they didn’t buy off al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups, they might be the target of a plane that’s hijacked into their oil processing plants, and that would ruin them for years. The second reason is that the Saudis practice what we would view in America as a fundamentalist branch of the Islamic faith that actually becomes a breeding ground for terrorism.

BAER: There's a lot that we really don’t know. There are a lot of people in the royal family that sympathize with bin Laden. There are people in the royal family that feel humiliated by colonialism -- call it what you want -- by the United States, by Israel. And they’re humiliated that they are citizens or subjects of a country that has never fought a war, and yet spends so much money on defense. They’re humiliated that they don’t take the Israelis on, because their army is worthless. And maybe they’re not humiliated but rather disenfranchised because they can never advance up the ranks of the family, and it’s a very tough culture. They sit around and they read the Koran. And they get on these Islamic websites, and they watch Al-Jazeera. And they go to the mosque, and I think they’re believers.

You've got a very fragmented Saudi society. I can only identify a couple of those princes. There’s a senior one named Salman, whom I mention in the book, who had some sort of late conversion. But there are other ones. You hear rumors about them, and I didn’t dare put them in the book, because I’m not sure of the information. Then there are the other princes who are Westernized in the sense of their tastes: They drink, they like women, they like to spend a lot of money. They have the diamond-studded Rolex watches. They just love money for the power it gives them over other subjects. And they know they have a problem with the fundamentalists. They figure, if I can make gestures toward them, they won’t bother me. And the fundamentalists haven’t, for the most part.

If I were a fundamentalist and I wanted to take Saudi Arabia over, what I would do is I’d go after the royal family. I would set off a few car bombs and kill a couple of them. Destabilize the country. But for some reason, the royal family has not been the victim of terrorism that they claim they have been. You cannot name a single case where the fundamentalists killed a Saudi prince. They claim all the time that there are all these plots afoot, and they’ve stopped them. But all the terrorism has really been against the United States and other Western countries, or Western interests in Saudi Arabia.

BUZZFLASH: You also mentioned how intertwined business relationships are with Saudi Arabia. Another point you bring out is that the Saudi Arabians keep possibly as much as a trillion dollars on deposit in U.S. banks. So how does that factor in?

BAER: Well, Kissinger set this up in the first oil embargo. He said, listen, fine, you can raise the price of oil. You’re going to get more money for your oil. But let’s be reasonable about this. Take this money and all this profit you’re making, and invest it in the United States, which is a perfectly good policy, by the way. Buy our arms. Keep your money here. It’ll keep our economy floating. We won’t go into a recession or a depression because of high oil prices. And we’re all going to win by this. And that worked fine.

But then that goes back to the dependency. We depend so much on Saudi investments in the stock market, in Citibank and other funds. This is not just Saudi money; it’s other Arab money too. If we go into a confrontation with the Middle East, especially with oil prices so high right now, and that money is not recirculated back in the United States, it’s going to do some real damage. Or if one day, they just completely pull their money out. I mean, that’s the perfect storm: an oil embargo, the Saudis and others' pulling their money out, and having the price of oil go up to $70 - $80 a barrel. We would be hurt, badly hurt.

BUZZFLASH: You’re very skeptical in your book on the possibility of imposing democracy in the Middle East.

BAER: I look at Iraq today. Yesterday, you had the Turkmen killing the Kurds. You had the Shi'a Muslims blowing each other up in Najef. I wouldn't even know where to begin to impose democracy on these countries. In order for a democracy to be established in a country, there has to be an intellectual tradition of democracy within the country. There needs to be some prior rule of law. For example, the Weimar Republic had a democratic rule of law in the ‘30s that laid the foundation for the post-World War II occupation. And the Russians had sort of a democracy in the early 1900's even though they’re not doing very well now.

It’s really hard to get people in countries like Iraq to understand what you’re talking about [when you talk about democracy], when they’re so tied up in religion and the rule of God. In Saudi Arabia, the rule of law is whatever the prince that comes along says; that's the system of justice. I think we can offer by example democracy in adjoining countries, but at the end of the day, we really can’t impose it.

READ THE REST.

Toxic Sprays are a Political Issue
by E.G. Vallianatos

After a 1998-2003 moratorium on testing pesticides on humans, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is about to legalize the abhorrent practice. One can probably tolerate human testing for medicines, but why should a civilized society test farm sprays on humans?

Most of these poisons came to agriculture straight from World War II. That fact ought to have been sufficient to ban them, thus avoiding the threat of the contamination of food and drinking water.

But agribusiness uses pesticides as lubricants in its power grab in rural America. The poisons farmers spray control insects, crop diseases and grasses only as an afterthought. This is because these toxins primarily are political. They enable landowners to be sole masters of very large farms and plantations while they empty rural areas of small family farmers.

Agribusiness maintains its power by co-opting the federal and state governments, including land grant universities, in making sprays the emblems of science and modernization.

So the owners of pesticides resort to "studying" the effects of their sprays on animals, most of the time showing the sprays innocent of cancer or other deleterious effects.

But the history of pesticides testing is full of fraud and uncertainty about their safety when industry is performing the tests. Nevertheless, the EPA has been approving pesticides for farms and lawns. Now the chemical industry wants to speed up that process of approval for their gold-making toxins by means of testing them on humans.

The EPA is going along with this unethical proposal because it has no choice. George W. Bush, and corporations that brought him to power, see nothing wrong in violating international norms such as the Nuremberg code that warns against falling back into the inhuman practice of making humans experimental animals.

READ THE REST.

From Grist on-line magazine.

Cities spending millions on land to protect water supplies

Many U.S. cities are discovering they have a choice: Build huge, multibillion-dollar water-treatment plants, or buy up land around water supplies to prevent them from being polluted in the first place. More and more, they are choosing the latter option -- derailing sprawl and protecting open space in the process. Austin, Texas, has used about $80 million in bonds since 1998 to buy up 20,000 acres around the nearby Edwards Aquifer (and may ask voters for $100 million more next year to expand the buffer). Since 1997, New York City has locked up about 70,000 acres of land along streams and rivers in the Catskill Mountains, at a cost of roughly $170 million. The buy-ups have sometimes been controversial with landowners and developers -- though cities generally pay market rates and set up conservation easements to preserve property values -- but they are popular with people who drink water.

Demand up for eco-friendly home-building supplies

Consumers have turned on to the benefits of eco-timber, sustainably harvested cork flooring, and low-VOC paint, moving green home-building supplies out of the fringe and into the mainstream. "There's no question where this is going; it's hot," says Timothy Taylor. His company, Environmental Home Center, started up in an 800-square-foot Seattle storefront in 1992; today it's a multimillion-dollar business Taylor hopes to take nationwide. Established national chains are also noticing the green tint in buyer preferences: Home Depot is testing an "EcoOptions" marketing theme in all of its Canadian stores. For now, the added expense of eco-friendly options means the market is generally restricted to affluent Whole-Foods types, but all involved have high hopes for economies of scale lowering prices to the point that, say, a poor nonprofit employee might be able to afford a new tankless water heater.

Deepwater fish being pushed to the edge of extinction

Key species of deep-sea fish are nearing extinction, having declined by up to 98 percent in the past few decades. In a new study in the journal Nature, three researchers analyzed catches of five deepwater species from the northwest Atlantic, off the Canadian coast -- each seldom harvested prior to the 1970s. They found that populations of all five had fallen precipitously, qualifying them as critically endangered under commonly accepted international standards. Similar trends have been seen in European waters. Much of the blame is being put on commercial trawlers, which in the last two decades have increasingly gone after deep-sea species. Said study coauthor Jennifer Devine, "One step that should be enacted is the protection of deep-sea habitats." Conservationists worry that because deepwater fish typically live long lives, and can take up to 25 years to sexually mature, overfishing can wipe them out in a single generation.

Posted: 6 Jan. 2006

This is what happens to American citizens who dare to criticize the Bush regime. I'm wondering how long it will be before I find name on a No-Fly list?

James Moore
Wed Jan 4

There are times in which it is easy to be suspicious. We can get to that feeling fairly quickly if we even pay slight attention. I've been trying to get over this odd emotion for at least a year. I can't find any rationale for letting it go, though I want desperately not to have these thoughts.

This week last year I was preparing for a trip to Ohio to conduct interviews and research for a new book I was writing. My airline tickets had been purchased on line and the morning of departure I went to the Internet to print out my boarding pass. I got a message that said, "Not Allowed." Several subsequent tries failed. Surely, I thought, it's just a glitch within the airline's servers or software.

I made it a point to arrive very early at the airport. My reservation was confirmed before I left home. I went to the electronic kiosk and punched in my confirmation number to print out my boarding pass and luggage tags. Another error message appeared, "Please see agent."

I did. She took my Texas driver's license and punched in the relevant information to her computer system.

"I'm sorry, sir," she said. "There seems to be a problem. You've been placed on the No Fly Watch List."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm afraid there isn't much more that I can tell you," she explained. "It's just the list that's maintained by TSA to check for people who might have terrorist connections."

"You're serious?"

"I'm afraid so, sir. Here's an 800 number in Washington. You need to call them before I can clear you for the flight."

Exasperated, I dialed the number from my cell, determined to clear up what I was sure was a clerical error. The woman who answered offered me no more information than the ticket agent.

"Mam, I'd like to know how I got on the No Fly Watch List."

"I'm not really authorized to tell you that, sir," she explained after taking down my social security and Texas driver's license numbers.

"What can you tell me?"

"All I can tell you is that there is something in your background that in some way is similar to someone they are looking for."

"Well, let me get this straight then," I said. "Our government is looking for a guy who may have a mundane Anglo name, who pays tens of thousands of dollars every year in taxes, has never been arrested or even late on a credit card payment, is more uninteresting than a Tupperware party, and cries after the first two notes of the national anthem? We need to find this guy. He sounds dangerous to me."

"I'm sorry, sir, I've already told you everything I can."

"Oh, wait," I said. "One last thing: this guy they are looking for? Did he write books critical of the Bush administration, too?"

I have been on the No Fly Watch List for a year. I will never be told the official reason. No one ever is. You cannot sue to get the information. Nothing I have done has moved me any closer to getting off the list. There were 35,000 Americans in that database last year. According to a European government that screens hundreds of thousands of American travelers every year, the list they have been given to work from has since grown to 80,000.

My friends tell me it is just more government incompetence. A tech buddy said there's no one in government smart enough to write a search algorithm that will find actual terrorists, so they end up with authors of books criticizing the Bush White House. I have no idea what's going on.

I suppose I should think of it as a minor sacrifice to help keep my country safe. Not being able to print out boarding passes in advance and having to get to the airport three hours early for every flight is hardly an imposition compared to what Americans are enduring in Iraq. I can force myself to get used to all that extra attention from the guy with the wand whenever I walk through the electronic arches. I'm just doing my patriotic duty.

Of course, there's always the chance that the No Fly Watch List is one of many enemies lists maintained by the Bush White House. If that's the case, I am happy to be on that list. I am in good company with people who expect more out of their president and their government.

Hell, maybe I'll start thinking of it as an honor roll.

Posted: 3 Jan. 2006

From Grist on-line magazine.

FBI's been monitoring green groups, using secret informants

Ever get the creepy feeling somebody's watching you? Well, it's not the weed: The FBI has been spying on U.S. environmental, animal-liberation, and other activist groups -- though the feds insist it's the innocuous, totally legal kind of spying. Greenpeace and PETA, among others, have shown up repeatedly in thousands of pages of heavily censored documents the American Civil Liberties Union received as part of a Freedom of Information Act request. The Feebs not only monitored the protests and websites of such groups, but in some cases used confidential informants, from employees to interns, to gather the intel (you knew there was something fishy about that guy in the pleated khakis). Attempting to downplay the surveillance of domestic groups based on their administration-unfriendly politics, a bureau spokesspook said soothingly, "Just being referenced in an FBI file is not tantamount to being the subject of an investigation." We feel tons better. You?

From The Center for American Progress.

INTELLIGENCE
Violating the Law, Endangering Americans

President Bush's warrantless domestic spying program not only violates the law, it puts the American people at risk. On Sunday, President Bush defended the program, claiming, "The NSA program is one that listens to a few numbers, called from the outside of the United States and of known al Qaeda or affiliate people. In other words, the enemy is calling somebody and we want to know who they’re calling and why." If the government knows a U.S. person is communicating with al Qaeda or al Qaeda affiliates, however, the surveillance would be approved by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. (Remember, doing so would not slow the process down because you can obtain the approval up to 72-hours after the surveillance has begun.) Evidence obtained with a warrant from the FISA court, in most cases, can be used to charge and prosecute a suspect. In fact, Section 218 of the Patriot Act amended FISA to make it easier to introduce evidence obtained with a FISA warrant to prosecute people. Meanwhile, every conversation monitored under Bush’s warrantless domestic surveillance program is a missed opportunity to keep someone who is talking to al-Qaeda off the streets. Evidence obtained by Bush’s warrantless domestic spying program is probably not admissible in court. Convictions obtained with evidence from this program may be overturned. Suspected terrorists are already pursuing appeals. Conversations between U.S. persons and a known terrorist should be monitored, but Americans would be safer if President Bush would suspend the program and start following the law.

TOP ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS OBJECTED TO WARRANTLESS SPYING: Bush administration officials at the top levels of the Justice Department raised serious objections about President Bush's warrantless domestic spying program. The New York Times reported Sunday that, in 2004, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft's top deputy, James Comey, "indicated he was unwilling to give his approval to certifying central aspects of the program, as required under the White House procedures set up to oversee it." Comey was acting as attorney general at the time because Ashcroft was recovering from gallbladder surgery. Comey's refusal "prompted two of President Bush's most senior aides - Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now attorney general - to make an emergency visit to a Washington hospital in March 2004 to...try to win the needed approval from Attorney General John Ashcroft." According to Newsweek, Ashcroft -- one of the most loyal members of the Bush administration -- refused to extend approval of the program. Some officials say Ashcroft was responding to concerns about "whether the president had the legal and constitutional authority to conduct such an operation." Around the time of the hospital visit, "the White House suspended parts of the program for several months" but ultimately continued it. It's unclear "whether the White House ultimately persuaded Mr. Ashcroft to give his approval to the program after the meeting or moved ahead without it."

INFORMATION PASSED TO DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE: The Washington Post reports, "Information captured by the National Security Agency's secret eavesdropping on communications between the United States and overseas has been passed on to other government agencies." Among the recipients was the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). NBC News revealed earlier last month that the Defense Department was conducting "monitoring of peaceful anti-war and counter-military recruitment groups." Detailed surveillance included "collecting information about who’s at those [anti-war] protests, [and] the descriptions of vehicles at those protests."

CRITICISM OF THE PROGRAM IS BIPARTISAN: Bill Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard, dismisses criticism about the warrantless spying program as the product of "paranoid liberalism." Actually, much of the criticism about the program has come from staunch conservatives. Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee said, "There is no doubt that this is inappropriate" and announced his intention to hold hearings. (This Sunday, Sen. Dick Lugar (R-IN) supported the idea). Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said, "I don’t know of any legal basis to go around [FISA]." This weekend on Meet the Press, conservative columnist William Safire announced "I'm with the critics." The program is also opposed by a board member of the ultra-conservative Federalist Society.


SUPREME COURT
Alito's Imbalancing Act

What is becoming clear about Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito is that he has a warped sense of the balance of power in American society. From his early writings as a political appointee in the Justice Department to his later rulings as an appellate court judge on the Third Circuit, Alito has indicated support for placing power in the hands of an unchecked Executive Branch while stripping authority from Congress. Furthermore, he has been reluctant to uphold individual rights claims, generally taking the side of large corporations. Editorials across the country are now arguing Alito's "view of government power is far from the mainstream." The issue will take center stage when the Senate Judiciary Committee begins its review of Alito's nomination next Monday because, as Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) has argued, "The judges in our independent judiciary are our system's most crucial check and balance against abuses and excesses by the President and the rest of the government in wielding power. Accountability, and even our basic rights, are lost if our courts fail in this role." Below is a summation of Alito's understanding of balance of power:

FOR -- UNCHECKED PRESIDENTIAL POWER: While working in the Reagan Justice Department, Alito wrote in 1984 that "the attorney general should have absolute immunity for warrantless wiretapping." Separately, Alito also helped establish a new practice of issuing presidential bill-signing statements that served to "tip the balance of power between Congress and the White House a little more in favor of the executive branch." The Palm Beach Post recently opined that Alito has shown "a desire to give government the kind of power most conservatives abhor." In arguing for presidential signing statements, Alito said, "Since the president's approval is just as important as that of the House or Senate, it seems to follow that the president's understanding of the bill should be just as important as that of Congress." That understanding of presidential authority upends the Supreme Court's historical interpretation of the proper constitutional balance of power. Justice Robert Jackson wrote in his famous concurring opinion in Youngstown Co. v. Sawyer, "The Founders of this Nation entrusted the lawmaking power to the Congress alone in both good and bad times."

FOR -- CORPORATE POWER: "Business couldn't do any better than Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court." The AP surveyed Alito's Third Circuit opinions and found that he has "compiled a record of backing businesses in employee claims of sex and racial discrimination during 15 years" on the court. Prior to the announcement of Alito's nomination, it has been reported that the White House sought the approval of business groups such as the Chamber of Commerce and the National Association of Manufacturers. Such groups believe they have a friend in Alito due to his record of disfavoring discrimination suits brought by workers and his pro-business interpretation of contracts cases involving commercial speech and shareholder suits.

AGAINST -- CONGRESS' CONSTITUTIONAL POWER: Alito's appellate record indicates his desire to limit congressional authority. In Chittister v. Department of Community and Economic Development, Alito held that Congress had no authority to require state employers to pay damages for violating employees' rights to sick leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act, a ruling that was later repudiated by the Supreme Court. In another case, United States v. Rybar, Alito argued in dissent that Congress lacked authority to ban the transfer and possession of machine guns. Dennis Henigan, legal director of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, said Alito's opinion in Rybar is "perhaps the most powerful evidence that Judge Alito is very much a right-wing judicial activist" willing to disregard congressional judgment.

AGAINST -- INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS: Alito's record indicates a lack of concern for empowering individuals and preserving their rights. Adam Cohen writes in the New York Times that Alito opposed "a cornerstone of American democracy: one person one vote. ... Rejecting the one-person-one-vote principle is a radical position. If Judge Alito still holds this view today, he could lead the court to accept a very different vision of American democracy, one in which it would be far easier for powerful special interests to get a stranglehold on government." Alito has also shown little regard for the privacy of Americans. In addition to his willingness to grant executive immunity for wiretapping American citizens, Alito has upheld the strip search of a 10-year old girl and earlier expressed a view that "the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion." Alito has since indicated that he believes there is a fundamental right to privacy, though the extent of his views are not yet clear.

Under the Radar

INTELLIGENCE -- NEW BOOK REVEALS CIA IGNORED PRE-WAR INTELLIGENCE REFUTING WMD CLAIMS: James Risen, one of the New York Times reporters who revealed Bush's secret warantless wiretapping on American citizens, puts forth fresh evidence in his new book, State of War: The Secret History of the C.I.A. and the Bush Administration, that the C.I.A. repeatedly ignored pre-war intelligence showing that Iraq no longer had weapons of mass destruction. According to Risen, the C.I.A. recruited Iraqi-Americans to contact family members who had involvement in Hussein's nuclear programs. "In all, the book says, some 30 family members of Iraqis made trips to their native country to contact Iraqi weapons scientists, and all of them reported that the programs had been abandoned." In one 2002 case, an Iraqi-American anesthesiologist contacted her brother regarding Iraq's nuclear program, who "was stunned by her questions about the nuclear program because — he said — it had been dead for a decade."

IRAQ -- The Bush administration has decided to not "seek any new funds for Iraq reconstruction," seemingly dropping the economic track of its National Strategy for Victory in Iraq. Nearly half of the $18.4 billion U.S. rebuilding effort "was eaten away by the insurgency, a buildup of Iraq's criminal justice system and the investigation and trial of Saddam Hussein" and "tens of billions of dollars of work [is] yet to be done merely to bring reliable electricity, water and other services to Iraq’s 26 million people." Average hours of electricity are still below prewar levels and in December, "the country's oil exports hit their lowest monthly level since U.S. forces overthrew Saddam Hussein in 2003."

Posted: 1 Jan. 2006

A vet speaks out about Bush
By DOUG THOMPSON

Tim Abbott is a Vietnam veteran who lives in the Southwestern Virginia town of Hillsville, a conservative, blue-collar community that tends to vote Republican and bleed red, white and blue.

But, like an increasing number of veterans, Abbott is fed up with President George W. Bush.

“Bush talks a lot about freedom, courage, transparent government and the rule of law. He talks,” Abbott says. “His speeches are carefully choreographed before audiences of his faithful -- often Christian fundamentalists or, to paraphrase Bush, Christian-fascists -- and they must sign loyalty oaths to Bush. He speaks before audience after audience of soldiers and sailors who cannot speak except as directed by the White House.”

Normally, such comments would be risky in a mountain town where Patriotism rules supreme but Abbott expressed his views this week in an op ed article for The Roanoke Times and found many people agreeing with him.

“When I think of Bush, I do not think of liberty and courage, compassion and justice. No, I think of arrogance, greed and lies,” Abbott wrote. “He is a thug, a buffoon and a coward. Not only is he incompetent, he is corrupt.”

READ THE REST.

And now for something completely different...

The Flick of a switch: A wall becomes a window becomes a hologram generator. Any chair becomes a hypercomputer, any rooftop a power or waste treatment plant.

Programmable matter is probably not the next technological revolution, nor even perhaps the one after that. But it's coming, and when it does, it will change our lives as much as any invention ever has. Imagine being able to program matter itself--to change it, with the click of a cursor, from hard to soft, from paper to stone, from fluorescent to super-reflective to invisible. Supported by companies ranging from Levi Strauss to IBM and the Defense Department, solid-state physicists in laboratories at MIT, Harvard, Sun Microsystems, and elsewhere are currently creating arrays of microscopic devices called "quantum dots" that are capable of acting like programmable atoms. They can be configured electronically to replicate the properties of any known atom and then can be changed, as fast as an electrical signal can travel, to have the properties of a different atom. Soon it will be possible not only to engineer into solid matter such unnatural properties as variable magnetism, programmable flavors, or exotic chemical bonds, but also to change these properties at will.

Wil McCarthy visits the laboratories and talks with the researchers who are developing this extraordinary technology; describes how they are learning to control its electronic, optical, thermal, magnetic, and mechanical properties; and tells us where all this will lead. The possibilities are truly magical.

CHECK IT OUT.

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