MY POV

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

"Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase 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 etermine 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: 28 April 2007

Goodbye, Baghdad
I'm finally leaving Iraq. But it's hard to decide which is more frightening: Car bombs and militias, or leaving everything you know and love.

Editor's note: Baghdad Burning, the blog written by a young Iraqi woman named "Riverbend," has given readers around the world an intimate, and devastating, look at the situation in Iraq. Salon occasionally runs postings from her blog.
By Riverbend

April 28, 2007 | BAGHDAD, Iraq -- The Great Wall of Segregation is the wall the current Iraqi government is building (with the support and guidance of the Americans). It's a wall that is intended to separate and isolate what is now considered the largest 'Sunni' area in Baghdad -- let no one say the Americans are not building anything. According to plans the Iraqi puppets and Americans cooked up, it will 'protect' A'adhamiya, a residential/mercantile area that the current Iraqi government and their death squads couldn't empty of Sunnis.

The wall, of course, will protect no one. I sometimes wonder if this is how the concentration camps began in Europe. The Nazi government probably said, "Oh look -- we're just going to protect the Jews with this little wall here -- it will be difficult for people to get into their special area to hurt them!" And yet, it will also be difficult to get out.

The Wall is the latest effort to further break Iraqi society apart. Promoting and supporting civil war isn't enough, apparently -- Iraqis have generally proven to be more tenacious and tolerant than their mullahs, ayatollahs, and Vichy leaders. It's time for America to physically divide and conquer -- like Berlin before the wall came down or Palestine today. This way, they can continue chasing Sunnis out of "Shia areas" and Shia out of "Sunni areas."

I always hear the Iraqi pro-war crowd interviewed on television from foreign capitals (they can only appear on television from the safety of foreign capitals because I defy anyone to be publicly pro-war in Iraq). They refuse to believe that their religiously inclined, sectarian political parties fueled this whole Sunni/Shia conflict. They refuse to acknowledge that this situation is a direct result of the war and occupation. They go on and on about Iraq's history and how Sunnis and Shia were always in conflict and I hate that. I hate that a handful of expats who haven't been to the country in decades pretend to know more about it than people actually living there.

I remember Baghdad before the war -- one could live anywhere. We didn't know what our neighbors were -- we didn't care. No one asked about religion or sect. No one bothered with what was considered a trivial topic: are you Sunni or Shia? You only asked something like that if you were uncouth and backward. Our lives revolve around it now. Our existence depends on hiding it or highlighting it -- depending on the group of masked men who stop you or raid your home in the middle of the night.

READ THE REST.

U.S. media have lost the will to dig deep
A changed news culture has let several important investigative stories slip through the cracks.
By Greg Palast, GREG PALAST is the author of "Armed Madhouse: From New Orleans to Baghdad -- Sordid Secrets and Strange Tales of a White House Gone Wild."
April 27, 2007

IN AN E-MAIL uncovered and released by the House Judiciary Committee last month, Tim Griffin, once Karl Rove's right-hand man, gloated that "no [U.S.] national press picked up" a BBC Television story reporting that the Rove team had developed an elaborate scheme to challenge the votes of thousands of African Americans in the 2004 election.

Griffin wasn't exactly right. The Los Angeles Times did run a follow-up article a few days later in which it reported the findings. But he was essentially right. Most of the major U.S. newspapers and the vast majority of television news programs ignored the story even though it came at a critical moment just weeks before the election.

According to Griffin (who has since been dispatched to Arkansas to replace one of the U.S. attorneys fired by the Justice Department), the mainstream media rejected the story because it was wrong.

"That guy is a British reporter who accepted some false allegations and made a story up," he said.

Let's get one fact straight, Mr. Griffin. "That guy" is not a British reporter. I am an American living abroad, putting investigative reports on the air from London for the British Broadcasting Corp.

I'm not going to argue with Rove's minions about the validity of our reporting, which led the news in Britain. But I can tell you this: To the extent that it was ignored in the United States, it wasn't because the report was false. It was because it was complicated and murky and because it required a lot of time and reporting to get to the bottom of it. In fact, not one U.S. newsperson even bothered to ask me or the BBC for the data and research we had painstakingly done in our effort to demonstrate the existence of the scheme.

The truth is, I knew that a story like this one would never be reported in my own country. Because investigative reporting — the kind Jack Anderson used to do regularly and which was carried in hundreds of papers across the country, the kind of muckraking, data-intensive work that takes time and money and ruffles feathers — is dying.

READ THE REST.

Posted: 24 April 2007

This is so excellent. And published by the American Conservative, of all places.

Twilight Zone Pass through the portal to the alternate reality of the War Party’s propagandists.
by Gregory Cochran

I think almost everybody has wondered what would have happened if they had made a different choice in life, taken a different path. If you didn’t think of it by yourself, seeing “It’s a Wonderful Life” a few hundred times has probably driven the point home by now.

Many authors have applied this idea to big turning points, writing about alternative histories in which Hitler won World War II (Fatherland) or the South won the Civil War (Bring the Jubilee). The notion may not be pure fantasy: the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests that these Worlds-of-If may really exist, although forever unreachable.

Or maybe not so unreachable. A very odd pattern of statements by prominent supporters and members of the Bush administration suggests that we may have some truly unusual visitors—literally out-of-this-world.

You see, the president and his associates keep referring to historical events that never happened, at least not as they did in the fields we know. And they keep referring to the same ahistorical events. Over and over, the secretary of state and the (now former) secretary of defense have referred to guerrilla warfare in Germany after the Nazi surrender. But there just wasn’t any. You can’t find it in the history books or in the memories of people who were there at the time. My uncle was in Bavaria in the summer of 1945: no trouble. Secretary Rumsfeld repeatedly talked about the similarities between today’s Iraq and America after the Revolutionary War, but again, I’m pretty sure that there aren’t any. I don’t believe we found tortured corpses in the streets of Philadelphia every morning back in 1784. And why does President Bush keep saying that Saddam refused to admit those UN arms inspectors back in 2002 and early 2003? Why did Condoleezza Rice, in 2000, say that Iran was probably backing the Taliban, when in fact the two had almost gone to war in 1998?

Now some might say that these statements were just talking points—that is, lies—but I sure wouldn’t want to accuse anyone of lying. More to the point, there have been many ahistorical statements that are just strange and don’t seem to advance any particular political agenda. For example, when President Bush said that the Japanese lost two carriers sunk and one damaged at the Battle of Midway (instead of losing all four, which is what actually happened), who gained? When POTUS said that Sweden has no army (it does), what political argument was advanced?

We’re talking about the rulers of the most powerful nation on earth. It can’t be that they’re just pig-ignorant—of their own history, yet. There has to be a deeper, more subtle explanation.

READ THE REST.

The GOP's cyber election hit squad
by Steven Rosenfeld and Bob Fitrakis
April 22, 2007

Did the most powerful Republicans in America have the computer capacity, software skills and electronic infrastructure in place on Election Night 2004 to tamper with the Ohio results to ensure George W. Bush's re-election?

The answer appears to be yes. There is more than ample documentation to show that on Election Night 2004, Ohio's "official"Secretary of State website – which gave the world the presidential election results – was redirected from an Ohio government server to a group of servers that contain scores of Republican web sites, including the secret White House e-mail accounts that have emerged in the scandal surrounding Attorney General Alberto Gonzales’s firing of eight federal prosecutors.

Recent revelations have documented that the Republican National Committee (RNC) ran a secret White House e-mail system for Karl Rove and dozens of White House staffers. This high-tech system used to count and report the 2004 presidential vote– from server-hosting contracts, to software-writing services, to remote-access capability, to the actual server usage logs themselves – must be added to the growing congressional investigations.

Numerous tech-savvy bloggers, starting with the online investigative consortium epluribusmedia.org and their November 2006 article cross-posted by contributor luaptifer to Dailykos, and Joseph Cannon's blog at Cannonfire.blogspot.com, outed the RNC tech network. That web-hosting firm is SMARTech Corp. of Chattanooga, TN, operating out of the basement in the old Pioneer Bank building. The firm hosts scores of Republican websites, including georgewbush.com, gop.com and rnc.org.

READ THE REST.

LSD as Therapy? Write about It, Get Barred from US
BC psychotherapist denied entry after border guard googled his work.
By Linda Solomon

Andrew Feldmar, a well-known Vancouver psychotherapist, rolled up to the Blaine border crossing last summer as he had hundreds of times in his career. At 66, his gray hair, neat beard, and rimless glasses give him the look of a seasoned intellectual. He handed his passport to the U.S. border guard and relaxed, thinking he would soon be with an old friend in Seattle. The border guard turned to his computer and googled "Andrew Feldmar."

The psychotherapist's world was about to turn upside down.

Born in Hungary to Jewish parents as the Nazis were rising to power, Feldmar was hidden from the Nazis during the Holocaust when he was three years old, after his parents were condemned to Auschwitz. Miraculously, his parents both returned alive and in 1945 Hungary was liberated by the Russian army. Feldmar escaped from communist Hungary in 1956 when he was 16 and immigrated to Canada. He has been married to Meredith Feldmar, an artist, for 37 years, and they live in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood. They have two children, Soma, 33, who lives in Denver, and Marcel, 36, a resident of L.A. Highly respected in his field, Feldmar has been travelling to the U.S. for work and to see his family five or six times a year. He has worked for the UN, in Sarajevo and in Minsk with Chernobyl victims.

The Blaine border guard explained that Feldmar had been pulled out of the line as part of a random search. He seemed friendly, even as he took away Feldmar's passport and car keys. While the contents of his car were being searched, Feldmar and the officer talked. He asked Feldmar what profession he was in.

When Feldmar said he was psychologist, the official typed his name into his Internet search engine. Before long the customs guard was engrossed in an article Feldmar had published in the spring 2001 issue of the journal Janus Head. The article concerned an acid trip Feldmar had taken in London, Ontario, and another in London, England, almost forty years ago. It also alluded to the fact that he had used hallucinogenics as a "path"to understanding self and that in certain cases, he reflected, it could "be preferable to psychiatry."Everything seemed to collapse around him, as a quiet day crossing the border began to turn into a nightmare.

READ THE REST.

Posted: 20 April 2007

As a nation we grieve, and rightfully so, for the loss of 32 students at VA Tech. Now read about what the Iraqis suffer ten times over every day because of Bush, Cheney and the other neocon enablers.

"Sorry We Shot Your Kid, But Here's $500"

For the entire war in Iraq, the press has been kept largely in the dark concerning the number of civilians killed by our forces, and what happened in the aftemath. Now several hundred files posted online reveal some of the true horror while raising questions about lack of compensation.

By Greg Mitchell

(April 14, 2007) -- The most revealing new information on Iraq -- guaranteed to make readers sad or angry, or both -- is found not in any press dispatch but in a collection of several hundred PDFs posted on the Web this week.

Here you will find, for example, that when the U.S. drops a bomb that goes awry, lands in an orchard, and does not detonate -- until after a couple of kids go out to take a look -- our military does not feel any moral or legal reason to compensate the family of the dead child because this is, after all, broadly speaking, a "combat situation."

Also: What price (when we do pay) do we place on the life of a 9-year-old boy, shot by one of our soldiers who mistook his book bag for a bomb satchel? Would you believe $500? And when we shoot an Iraqi journalist on a bridge we shell out $2500 to his widow -- but why not the measly $5000 she had requested?

READ THE REST.

Posted: 19 April 2007

Post Office to the First Amendment: Drop Dead
by Robert W. McChesney

Everyone who visits the Common Dreams site is reading articles that were first published or commissioned by print publications. Without these print publications, there would be a lot less material for all of us to read, and some of our most important reporters and thinkers wouldn’t get paid to write.

Yet the independent magazines and small publications that contribute to Common Dreams are under attack by government bureaucrats and media conglomerates. Unless we take action now, the wide variety of voices and viewpoints available on sites like this one will become considerably diminished.

This crisis which could have devastating effect on new media revolves around Americas very first and arguably most visionary and progressive media policy: postal rates for periodicals.

Because the Post Office is a monopoly, and because magazines must use it, the postal rates always have been skewed to make it cheaper for smaller publications to get launched and to survive. The whole idea has been to use the postal rates to keep publishing as competitive and wide open as possible. This bedrock principle was put in place by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson. They considered it mandatory to create the press system, the Fourth Estate necessary for self-government.

It was postal policy that converted the free press clause in the First Amendment from an abstract principle into a living breathing reality for Americans. And it has served that role throughout our history. What the Post Office is now proposing goes directly against 215 years of postal policy. The Post Office is in the process of implementing a radical reformulation of its mailing rates for magazines. Under the plan, smaller periodicals will be hit with a much larger increase than the big magazines, as much as 30 percent. Some of the largest circulation magazines will face hikes of less than 10 percent.

The new rates, which go into effect on July 15, were developed with no public involvement or congressional oversight, and the increased costs could damage hundreds, even thousands, of smaller publications, possibly putting many out of business. This includes nearly every political journal in the nation. These are the magazines that often provide the most original journalism and analysis. These are the magazines that provide much of the content on Common Dreams. We desperately need them.

What the Post Office is planning to do now, in the dark of night, is implement a rate structure that gives the best prices to the biggest publishers, hence letting them lock in their market position and lessen the threat of any new competition. The new rates could make it almost impossible to launch a new magazine, unless it is spawned by a huge conglomerate.

Not surprisingly, the new scheme was drafted by Time Warner, the largest magazine publisher in the nation. All evidence available suggests the bureaucrats responsible have never considered the implications of their draconian reforms for small and independent publishers, or for citizens who depend upon a free press.

The corruption and sleaziness of this process is difficult to exaggerate. As one lawyer who works for a large magazine publisher admits, “It takes a publishing company several hundred thousand dollars to even participate in these rate cases. Some large corporations spend millions to influence these rates.” Little guys, and the general public who depend upon these magazines, are not at the table when the deal is being made.

The genius of the postal rate structure over the past 215 years was that it did not favor a particular viewpoint; it simply made it easier for smaller magazines to be launched and to survive. That is why the publications opposing the secretive Post Office rate hikes cross the political spectrum. This is not a left-wing issue or a right-wing issue, it is a democracy issue. And it is about having competitive media markets that benefit all Americans. This reform will have disastrous effects for all small and mid-sized publications, be they on politics, music, sports or gardening.

This process was conducted with such little publicity and pitched only at the dominant players that we only learned about it a few weeks ago and it is very late in the game. But there is something you can do. Please go to www.stoppostalratehikes.com and sign the letter to the Postal Board protesting the new rate system and demanding a congressional hearing before any radical changes are made. The deadline for comments is April 23.

I know many of you are connected to publications that go through the mail, or libraries and bookstores that pay for subscriptions to magazines and periodicals. If you fall in these categories, it is imperative you get everyone connected to your magazine or operation to go to www.stoppostalratehikes.com.

We do not have a moment to lose. If everyone who reads this piece responds at www.stoppostalratehikes.com, and then sends a link to it to their friends urging them to do the same, we can win. If there is one thing we have learned at Free Press over the past few years, it is that if enough people raise hell, we can force politicians to do the right thing. This is a time for serious hell-raising.

Robert W. McChesney is the co-author, with John Nichols, of Tragedy & Farce: How the American Media Sell Wars, Spin Elections, and Destroy Democracy (New Press). He is the founder of Free Press, www.freepress.net.

Senior Military, Intelligence, Law Enforcement, and Government Officials Question the 9/11 Commission Report

Many well known and respected senior U.S. military officers, intelligence services and law enforcement veterans, and government officials have expressed significant criticism of the 9/11 Commission Report or have made public statements that contradict the Report. Several even allege government complicity in the terrible acts of 9/11. This website is a collection of their statements. It is not an organization and it should be made clear that none of these individuals are affiliated with this website.

Listed below are statements by more than 90 of these senior officials. Their collective voices give credibility to the claim that the 9/11 Commission Report is tragically flawed. These individuals cannot be simply dismissed as irresponsible believers in some 9/11 conspiracy theory. Their sincere concern, backed by their decades of service to their country, demonstrate that criticism of the Report is not irresponsible, illogical, nor disloyal, per se. In fact, it can be just the opposite.

READ THE REST.

From The Center for American Progress.

New Court Begins Chipping Away

In a 5-4 decision yesterday, the Supreme Court dealt a damaging blow to women's rights, upholding a 2003 law that banned all mid-term abortions as early as 12 to15 weeks, without providing an exception for the health of the pregnant mother. The Court's decision, which marked the "first time the justices agreed that a specific abortion procedure could be banned," blatantly defied its own recent ruling in 2000, which said a mid-term abortion ban without exceptions for the health of the woman was an unconstitutional restriction. The ruling "clears the way for states to pass new laws" designed to discourage women from having abortions. "For the first time in 30 years, the Supreme Court has sanctioned a law that does not protect women's health and prohibits doctors from exercising their best medical judgment," said Jessica Arons, the director of women's health and rights program at the Center for American Progress. The majority opinion, authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, dismissed the medical community's opinion and instead adopted political rhetoric intended to appeal to the right-wing base. Noting the deep hostility to women's rights contained in the majority opinion's language, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing in dissent, said, "Throughout, the opinion refers to obstetrician-gynecologists and surgeons who perform abortions not by the titles of their medical specialties, but by the pejorative label abortion doctor. A fetus is described as an 'unborn child,' and as a 'baby,'...and the reasoned medical judgments of highly trained doctors are dismissed as 'preferences' motivated by 'mere convenience.'" Reading her dissent aloud in a stone-silent courtroom, Ginsburg said the decision "cannot be understood as anything other than an effort to chip away" at a woman's right to choose to have an abortion.

NO MORE HEALTH EXCEPTION: In 2003, Congress passed, and Bush signed, the "Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act." In its passage, Congress refused to adopt an amendment proposed by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA) that would have banned such abortions except in cases where "the medical judgment of the attending physician" determined the abortion was necessary to preserve the life of the woman or avert serious adverse health consequences. Rather than crafting appropriate law, conservatives appeared more interested in setting up a judicial showdown over ways to restrict the right to abortion itself. The Court's decision now imperils the requirement for a woman's "health exception," which until yesterday, had survived long legal scrutiny. The American College Obstetricians and Gynecologists had informed the Court that upholding the Ban would "chill doctors from providing a wide range of procedures used to perform induced abortions or to treat cases of miscarriage and will gravely endanger the health of women in this country." Yesterday, the women's health physicians group said, "This decision discounts and disregards the medical consensus [and] diminishes the doctor-patient relationship by preventing physicians from using their clinical experience and judgment."

FORCING WOMEN TO SUFFER: "The [Partial Birth Abortion Ban] act, on its face, is not void for vagueness and does not impose an undue burden from any overbreadth," Kennedy wrote for the court. He added that the proper way to make a challenge, if an abortion ban is claimed to harm a woman's right to abortion, is through an as-applied claim. "In effect, the decision deputizes district judges across the country to authorize or deny partial-birth abortions to pregnant women based on health considerations." Practically speaking, Kennedy's argument means the Court will consider the burdens of the mid-term abortion ban only if a woman is forced into a health-threatening situation, and the judiciary branch will examine such hardships on a case-by-case basis -- a rule never imposed before because of the time limitations involved in terminating a pregnancy. Eve Gartner of Planned Parenthood Federation of America said in response, "The idea that women could bring 'as applied' challenges literally as they're in the hospital bleeding or suffering some serious medical harm and need a banned abortion, the Court suggests well at that point the woman could bring a federal lawsuit. But just saying that shows how absurd and unworkable that remedy is."

ELECTIONS MATTER: The most important vote yesterday was that of the newest justice, Samuel Alito, appointed by President Bush after he won reelection to a second term in office. As a member of the 3rd District Court of Appeals, Alito had voted in July 2000 to strike down New Jersey's ban on mid-term abortions. "The New Jersey statute," he wrote, "lacks an exception for the preservation of the health of the mother." When Alito was nominated by Bush to replace O'Connor, many of his supporters argued that his decision in this case "proved that he would not be reliably anti-choice." He earned support in his nomination process when he said he "would not bring a political agenda to the court" and would be "respectful of precedent." But once presented with the opportunity to impose new ideological law, Alito grasped it, parting ways with O'Connor and his own previous judgments. The Washington Post's Andrew Cohen writes, "You can spin this any other way you want but in the end it comes down to a simple matter of personnel. Justice Alito was willing and able to go in the law where his predecessor, former Justice Sandra Day O'Connor wasn't."

Posted: 18 April 2007

From Grist, "gloom and doom with a sense of humor".

Study says ethanol fuel could cause more health problems than gasoline

Time to trot out Alanis, cuz this is what the kids call "ironic": a study from Stanford University says widespread use of ethanol in vehicles could have serious health effects. Atmospheric scientist Mark Jacobson ran computer models comparing air quality in 2020 based on use of both gasoline and E85, a blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline currently seeing a big old political and industrial push. He found that the ethanol blend would produce more ground-level ozone than gasoline, estimating that it could lead to a 4 percent increase in ozone-related deaths nationwide by 2020. The study, published in the online edition of the journal Environmental Science & Technology, also says hospitalizations for respiratory issues could increase and fuel-related cancer rates would likely remain the same. "We found that using E85 will cause at least as much health damage as gasoline," says Jacobson. "The question is, if we're not getting any health benefits, then why continue to promote ethanol?"

Posted: 17 April 2007

From Grist, "gloom and doom with a sense of humor".

Could cell phones be the culprit in honeybee disappearance?

Apiarists in the U.S. and Europe have been scratching their heads for months over rapidly waning honeybee populations. Now some scientists who have combed through the data are all abuzz with a new theory: cell phones. In bad news to mobile-attached ears, British researchers are suggesting that phone radiation could be disrupting bees' navigation systems. Research has shown that bees act differently around power lines, and a recent study found that up to 70 percent of the little stingers failed to return to hives that contained cordless-phone docking units. The implications, of course, go beyond bee welfare; Albert Einstein -- if not a bee expert, a relatively smart guy -- once said that in the absence of the busy crop pollinators, humans "would have only four years of life left." Ooh, that stings. Other theories for the bees' departure have included mites, pesticides, global warming, and genetically modified crops, but so far, none has been definitively proved.

From The Center for American Progress.

Tax Day's Unfairness

Since President Bush entered office, he has made tax policy a focus of his domestic agenda. "These are the basic ideas that guide my tax policy: lower income taxes for all, with the greatest help going for those most in need," said Bush of his "bold and fair tax relief plan." But a majority of Americans will not feel Bush's alleged tax relief today, as his tax schemes have disproportionately aided the wealthy, often at the expense of the poor and middle class. For example, in 2005, Bush's tax changes allowed Vice President Dick Cheney to reap $1.1 million in tax savings, but households in the bottom fifth income bracket only received an average of $20 from the tax cuts in 2006. Dissatisfaction with the state of the economy was a major force driving Americans to the polls in the 2006 elections, but Bush has still failed to deliver a fairer tax plan for Americans. "Despite major increases in outlays for war and security, the President and Congress substantially expanded the already unaffordable tax cuts in subsequent years. The fiscal and moral consequences of these blunders are staggering," states Robert S. McIntyre of the nonpartisan Citizens for Tax Justice.

A MORE UNEQUAL AMERICA: In part due to Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy, concentration of income in the United States is reaching record levels. "[T]ax rates faced by the wealthiest Americans have fallen, having also recently shown that the top 1% of American earners got a greater share of national income in 2005 than at any time since the 1920s." Americans earning over $1 million receive an average annual tax cut of [over] $100,000, whereas middle income families earning between $26,000 and $45,000 receive about $650. A study by the Congressional Budget Office explains that the "growing concentration of income at the top continues a long-term trend." "The share of after-tax income going to the top one percent rose from 12.2 percent in 2003 to 14.0 percent in 2004," making that the largest one-year increase in the share of income going to the top one percent in 15 years. The United States is fast approaching a "historic threshold: Should current trends continue -- from higher payroll taxes to the potential impact of the Alternative Minimum Tax on middle-class earners -- the U.S. system could tip from progressive to flat in a matter of years, at least for the top half of earners," according to a recent economic study. Now, the case for comprehensive tax reform is more pressing than ever.

TAX BURDENS ON THE POOR: "More than one in six taxpayers in 2004 received the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), highlighting its growing role in bolstering the incomes of struggling low-income parents." The EITC is "a refundable federal income tax credit for low-income working individuals and families," originally approved in 1975 to offset taxes on the poor and provide incentives to work. Since then, it has been called "the nation's most effective antipoverty program for working families," as it helped lift "more than four million people above the official poverty line" last year. But Bush's 2001 tax plan cut marriage taxes across the board, except for within the EITC, causing "half of low-income married couples to have lower benefits." The EITC is also unnecessarily complex for lower-income Americans, as more than 70 percent of filers rely on paying commercial tax preparers. Center for American Progress Director of Tax Policy John Irons has documented several ways to improve the EITC's efficacy for lower-income Americans, including reducing the marriage penalty and creating additional credits for larger families. These changes make the tax code fairer and only cost a fraction of the changes Bush has made, states Irons.

MIDDLE CLASS FACES THE ALTERNATIVE MINIMUM TAX: An increasing number of Americans will be in shock about the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT) this year. "The individual alternative minimum tax was originally designed to limit tax sheltering and to assure that high-income filers paid at least some tax." But Bush did not index the AMT to inflation and left it out of his original tax scheme; now it threatens to increasingly affect the middle class. "Unless the tax law is changed, some 23 million -- 17 percent of all filers -- will be subject to the AMT when they file in 2008," in contrast to the 3.7 million facing the AMT this year. Middle class citizens are being squeezed by the tax. One disgruntled taxpayer said that "the money she would ordinarily use for a vacation or to buy a piece of furniture will not be there. Instead, her family's annual income of $75,000 would be subject to the AMT. Unless something happens, she says, 'something will get cut from the family's budget.'" Any reform of AMT must make sure that wealthy Americans can no longer use loopholes to avoid their income responsibility, as capital gains are only taxed at 15 percent and "are not classified as sheltered income subject to the alternative tax. The result is that the richest taxpayers get a windfall while the burden shifts to others."

AN UNPRODUCTIVE REVENUE SERVICE: Reports show that the Internal Revenue Service has been increasingly "unproductive" in corporate audits. "[T]he IRS is wasting more and more of the time of its revenue agents during a period when, because of limited resources, the agency is auditing many fewer corporate returns than it did only a decade ago," according to a nonpartisan research group. As a result, corporations get a hefty break. "The percent of large companies audited fell from 44 percent in 2005 to 35 percent in 2006, and the average number of hours per audit fell from 978 to 941." The amount of money the IRS recommends for collection from these corporations dropped from $30.1 billion in 2005 to $25.5 billion in 2006. Simultaneously, the IRS is much more likely to audit the middle class. "Audits of these middle-class taxpayers rose to nearly 436,000 last year, up from about 147,000 returns in 2000," tripling audits of tax returns filed by people making $25,000 to $100,000. Furthermore, the Government Accountability Office reported major security vulnerabilities in the IRS, "threaten[ing] the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of IRS's financial and tax processing systems." In turn, taxpayer information remains more vulnerable to "scams."

Posted: 16 April 2007

From Grist, "gloom and doom with a sense of humor".

EPA relaxes clean-air requirements for ethanol-fuel plants

Before last week, plants turning corn into liquor (yes, please) were allowed to emit 250 tons of emissions per year before triggering clean-air regulations, while those processing corn into ethanol fuel could emit only 100 tons annually. Just doesn't seem fair, does it? So the U.S. EPA did the logical thing, announcing that ethanol-fuel plants will now be allowed the higher pollution level too -- and they won't have to keep track of emissions from vents and other minor sources. Because a process for making clean energy should get to be dirty! The new rule will not apply in urban areas that have air-quality problems, which is fine, since everyone knows people outside cities don't care about air quality. "Even with the change, ethanol is significantly net positive for emissions and greenhouse gases," declared the CEO of the National Corn Growers Association, but Frank O'Donnell of the nonprofit Clean Air Watch is unconvinced: "It's going to mean more dirty air and more disease." We need a drink.

Posted: 15 April 2007

Set your Tivos and DVRs. This is must-see TV.

Record of Iraq War Lies to Air April 25 on PBS
By David Swanson

Bill Moyers has put together an amazing 90-minute video documenting the lies that the Bush administration told to sell the Iraq War to the American public, with a special focus on how the media led the charge. I've watched an advance copy and read a transcript, and the most important thing I can say about it is: Watch PBS from 9 to 10:30 p.m. on Wednesday, April 25. Spending that 90 minutes on this will actually save you time, because you'll never watch television news again – not even on PBS, which comes in for its share of criticism.

While a great many pundits, not to mention presidents, look remarkably stupid or dishonest in the four-year-old clips included in "Buying the War," it's hard to take any spiteful pleasure in holding them to account, and not just because the killing and dying they facilitated is ongoing, but also because of what this video reveals about the mindset of members of the DC media. Moyers interviews media personalities, including Dan Rather, who clearly both understand what the media did wrong and are unable to really see it as having been wrong or avoidable.

It's great to see an American media outlet tell this story so well, but it leads one to ask: When will Congress tell it? While the Democrats were in the minority, they clamored for hearings and investigations, they pushed Resolutions of Inquiry into the White House Iraq Group and the Downing Street Minutes. Now, in the majority, they've gone largely silent. The chief exception is the House Judiciary Committee's effort to question Condoleezza Rice next week about the forged Niger documents.

But what comes out of watching this show is a powerful realization that no investigation is needed by Congress, just as no hidden information was needed for the media to get the story right in the first place. The claims that the White House made were not honest mistakes. But neither were they deceptions. They were transparent and laughably absurd falsehoods. And they were high crimes and misdemeanors.

READ THE REST.

I knew this war was a fraud from day one.

WAR ON TERROR LOOKS LIKE A FRAUD
by John Gleeson, Winnepeg Sun

Contrary to the "patriots" who try to use the deaths of our soldiers in Afghanistan to stifle debate on Canada's involvement in the War on Terror, I would say that as new evidence presents itself, we would indeed be cowards to ignore it simply because we've lost troops in the field and are therefore blindly committed to the mission.

And new evidence is piling up around us, arguably strong enough to declare the whole War on Terror an undeniable fraud.

Virtually ignored by mainstream media, the Americans showed their hand this year with the new Iraqi oil law, now making its way through Iraq's parliament.

The law -- which tens of thousands of Iraqis marched peacefully against on Monday when they called for the immediate expulsion of U.S. forces -- would transfer control of one of the largest oil reserves on the planet from Baghdad to Big Oil, delivering "the prize" at last that Vice-President Dick Cheney famously talked about in 1999 when he was CEO of Halliburton.

"The key point of the law," wrote Mother Jones' Washington correspondent James Ridgeway on March 1, "is that Iraq's immense oil wealth (115 billion barrels of proven reserves, third in the world after Saudi Arabia and Iran) will be under the iron rule of a fuzzy 'Federal Oil and Gas Council' boasting 'a panel of oil experts from inside and outside Iraq.' That is, nothing less than predominantly U.S. Big Oil executives.

"The law represents no less than institutionalized raping and pillaging of Iraq's oil wealth. It represents the death knell of nationalized Iraqi resources, now replaced by production sharing agreements, which translate into savage privatization and monster profit rates of up to 75% for (basically U.S.) Big Oil. Sixty-five of Iraq's roughly 80 oilfields already known will be offered for Big Oil to exploit."

READ THE REST.

Posted: 13 April 2007

Excerpt: Where Have All the Leaders Gone?
By Lee Iacocca with Catherine Whitney

04/11/07 -Had Enough? Am I the only guy in this country who's fed up with what's happening? Where the hell is our outrage? We should be screaming bloody murder. We've got a gang of clueless bozos steering our ship of state right over a cliff, we've got corporate gangsters stealing us blind, and we can't even clean up after a hurricane much less build a hybrid car. But instead of getting mad, everyone sits around and nods their heads when the politicians say, "Stay the course."Stay the course? You've got to be kidding. This is America, not the damned Titanic. I'll give you a sound bite: Throw the bums out! 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. Who Are These Guys, Anyway? Why are we in this mess? How did we end up with this crowd in Washington? Well, we voted for them, or at least some of us did. But I'll tell you what we didn't do. We didn't agree to suspend the Constitution. We didn't agree to stop asking questions or demanding answers. Some of us are sick and tired of people who call free speech treason. Where I come from that's a dictatorship, not a democracy. And don't tell me it's all the fault of right-wing Republicans or liberal Democrats. That's an intellectually lazy argument, and it's part of the reason we're in this stew. We're not just a nation of factions. We're a people. We share common principles and ideals. And we rise and fall together.

READ THE REST.

If this goes through, I'm going to puke.

Florida Legislature Forces University To Idolize Jeb Bush

Two weeks ago, the University of Florida voted to deny Jeb Bush an honorary degree. By a 38-28 vote, the faculty Senate rejected the former governor’s nomination, citing concerns about some of Bush’s education initiatives, including his dismantling of affirmative action programs in the state:

In higher education circles, Bush’s greatest criticism came over his “One Florida” plan, which ended race-based admissions in state universities. Black enrollment dropped at UF and statewide after the change took effect, as critics predicted.

Bush’s policies of “rewarding and punishing schools according to students’ standardized test results and using vouchers to send certain students to private schools at public expense” also contributed to the rejection of his nomination.

Upset by this lack of Jeb Bush adoration, the conservative-controlled House Schools & Learning Council voted yesterday to force the university to rename its education school the “Jeb Bush College of Education.”

READ THE REST.

From The Center for American Progress.

ETHICS -- WOLFOWITZ'S HYPOCRISY ON CORRUPTION: Soon after his tenure as president of the World Bank began, former Undersecretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz made it clear that "the new boss is going to be tough on corruption."He held up $800 million in lending to Indian health projects because of corrupt politicians in the Indian government, froze loans to Chad because the government had reneged on its promise to use oil revenue for poverty reduction, and cancelled 14 road contracts in Bangladesh because of corrupt bidding. But now, Wolfowitz's tenure is in danger of coming to an abrupt end because of his own corruption scandal. Following revelations that Wolfowitz arranged for his girlfriend, Shaha Riza, to be given a promotion -- including an annual salary of $193,590 -- that "clearly does not conform"to bank procedures, the chair of the World Bank Staff Association called yesterday for him to "act honorably and resign."When Wolfowitz addressed employess at the press conference, "calls of 'resign, resign' resounded through the World Bank's atrium."Wolfowitz apologized for his handling of the promotion yesterday, saying, "I made a mistake, for which I am sorry."His apology is not likely to stem calls for his resignation, as the World Bank's board of directors issued an unfavorable finding of facts on his role in Riza's promotion today and promised to "move expeditiously to reach a conclusion on possible actions to take."The Treasury Department's top international adviser, Undersecretary of International Affairs Timothy Adams, offered kind words about Wolfowitz yesterday, but "deflected questions on whether the Bush administration continues to support him,"though Deputy White House Press Secretary Tony Fratto told reporters yesterday that President Bush retains "full confidence"in him.

ETHICS -- WHITE HOUSE STONEWALLS WAXMAN'S INQUIRY INTO CHENEY-LINKED MZM CONTRACTS: On March 26, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) wrote a letter to White House Chief of Staff Josh Bolten demanding "all contracts, subcontracts, and task orders between MZM, Inc. ... and the Executive Office of the President."As The Progress Report has reported, there is good reason to believe fired U.S. attorney Carol Lam was targeting the White House's connections to MZM contractor Mitchell Wade, who pled guilty to paying more than $1 million in bribes to former Rep. Duke Cunningham. Despite no record of having ever received a federal contract, Wade's firm received a $140,000 contract in 2002 to provide a system to screen the President's mail. In his letter, Waxman requested that the White House provide documents relating to the White House-MZM contracts as soon as possible, but not later than Friday, April 6. Yet as the North County Times reports, Waxman has yet to receive the information he requested. "'The White House response is clearly not adequate at this point,' Waxman said in a written response to questions from the North County Times. On Friday, the White House gave its initial response to Waxman's March request, with President Bush's special counsel Emmet T. Flood saying there would be a delay."Waxman said he is willing to grant an extension, but that "any extension should be accompanied by a firm and expeditious schedule for production."He noted that on Jan. 23, his committee asked the Department of Homeland Security to provide it with documents on the Department's $30 billion contract with Boeing to design and build a comprehensive border security plan. Fifteen days later, he received 1,800 pages in documents in response to the request. By contrast, Waxman noted, "The [MZM] contract is small and complying with the request should not be complicated."

HUMAN RIGHTS -- BUSH'S SUDAN AMBASSADOR REFUSES TO CLASSIFY DARFUR AS GENOCIDE: Last month, President Bush's Special Humanitarian Coordinator for Sudan Andrew Natsios told a group of Georgetown students that the "term genocide is counter to the facts of what is really occurring in Darfur."In a testy exchange with Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing yesterday, Natsios defiantly refused to characterize the ongoing violence in Darfur as a genocide. When Menendez asked him, "Do you consider the ongoing situation in Darfur a genocide, yes or no?"Natsios retorted, "I just answered your question. ... There is very little fighting between rebels and the government and very few civilian casualties going on in Darfur right now."A recent Oxfam report on Sudan stated that "today the situation is as desperate as ever,"as "in the first two months of 2007, more than 80,000 more people fled the ongoing violence.""The ongoing violence in Sudan’s Darfur region continued to rise"as peacekeepers were fatally attacked in North Darfur just this week. Furthermore, the violence is increasingly dispersing. The United Nations reported yesterday that in the "latest sign that violence plaguing Darfur is spilling into neighboring Chad,"between 200 and 400 Chadians were feared dead in an “unusually brutal attack"last month. "What is happening in Chad has Darfur as its epicenter,"said a U.N. spokesman. "We've been warning this for months."Natsios's comments are part of a sad effort by the Bush administration to declare victory in the midst of an ongoing slaughter. To learn what can you do about the situation in Darfur, visit the Enough Project.

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