17-18 July 2004

Fox and Big Media
Center for American Progress, July 16, 2004
EXCERPT: The dangers of increasing consolidation within the media are becoming more apparent by the day, as this week's debut of "Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism" has led to a national debate over the role of corporate ownership of news organizations and the quality of the news that millions of Americans rely on every day. Fewer companies than ever control what we see, read, and hear. Corporate conglomerates focus almost exclusively on attaining higher ratings - not delivering critical information that the American public needs to make informed decisions. How has this come to pass? The government not only let it happen, but actively encouraged it.
SEE ALSO: Outfoxed: New Documentary Charges Fox News Tailored Coverage to Back Bush
(DemocracyNow!)
SEE ALSO: OutFoxed: Rupert Murdock's War On Journalism  1-Watch the Trailer, 2-Buy the DVD, 3-Take Action (OutFoxed.org)

Public Warms to Edwards; Record 62% Say Iraq War Has Not Been Worth It
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON and JANET ELDER
NYT, 16 July 2004
EXCERPT: Mr. Kerry's greatest opportunity appears to remain Mr. Bush's handling of Iraq. Fifty-one percent of respondents said the United States should have stayed out of Iraq, up from 46 percent in April, May and June. Forty-five percent said taking military action in Iraq was the right thing to do, down slightly from the past several months. Sixty-two percent said the war was not worth the loss of American lives and other costs, a figure that has risen steadily over the past few months. Signaling that the White House may be running into trouble in its effort to portray Mr. Bush as the surer pair of hands when it comes to national security, the poll suggested that the nation was closely split over which party would make better decisions when it comes to Iraq. Forty-five percent said the Democrats were more likely to make the right decisions about the war and 41 percent said Republicans. ...Mr. Bush's standing in the poll appeared not to be helped much by the transfer of sovereignty in Iraq. But nor was it hurt by the Senate Intelligence Committee's conclusion that the prewar intelligence about Iraq was flawed.
See complete poll results (pdf file) from the front page of the NYT.

The Politics of Oil
How one of the world's richest industries influences government and policy
Center for Public Ingegrity, 15 July 2004
EXCERPT: The oil and gas industry has spent more than $440 million since 1998 on campaign contributions and lobbying, the Center for Public Integrity (www.publicintegrity.org) disclosed today in a major report on the oil and gas industry. This is the first in a series of reports to be released throughout the year that identify the size and scope of the international oil and gas industry and measure its influence in the halls of government worldwide. The report includes the following pieces:
*Big Oil Protects its Interests: Industry spends hundreds of millions on lobbying, elections
*Gimme Shelter (From Taxes): U.S. oil and gas companies have 882 subsidiaries in tax haven countries
*Koch's Low Profile Belies Political Power: Private oil company does
both business and politics with the shades drawn
*A Pipeline of Influence: Even before he became VP, Dick Cheney and Bush
fundraisers were crafting national energy policy
*Big Oil Spends $400,000 on Government Junkets: Legislators taken to NASCAR races, "Wildcatters Ball"
To read the full report log on to http://www.publicintegrity.org
The Politics of Oil, will be featured on the PBS program "NOW with Bill Moyers." The program will feature the Center's findings from the entire report, as well as an interview with executive director Chuck Lewis.

The Stinky Tobacco Deal
NYT editorial, 16 July 2004
EXCERPT: ederal regulation of the tobacco industry is long overdue, and tobacco growers shouldn't be paid a huge ransom just so Congress feels it can do the right thing. But that is precisely the deal unfolding on Capitol Hill. The Senate overwhelmingly voted last night to grant the Federal Drug Administration jurisdiction over the tobacco industry, a long-overdue move. But the price for getting senators from tobacco-growing states on board is an unseemly $12 billion handout to tobacco growers, who have already been coddled for far too long by protectionist quotas meant to keep out cheaper foreign-grown tobacco. This compromise at the heart of the unusual alliance struck between antismoking advocates and tobacco farmers is ill advised. It creates a disastrous precedent for a nation that direly needs to start dismantling other crop supports, both for domestic budgetary reasons and to comply with international trade laws. The F.D.A.'s lack of jurisdiction over tobacco is an absurdity. But this is no way to give it the authority it deserves. Almost comically, the tobacco deal has been attached to a bill that was supposed to remove a corporate tax credit for exporters. That credit was ruled illegal by the World Trade Organization, and American exporters now face mounting punitive tariffs while Congress dithers. Unfortunately, that theoretically simple legislation has since become a major magnet for pork.
Over on the House side, things get only worse.

16 July 2004

BWUSA COMMENTARY
Mental Illness Strikes
Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 clearly illustrates anti-social behavior of the Bush government by documenting examples of compulsive lying combined with "megalo-kleptomaniacal" tendencies (imperialism). As it happens, this coincidentally places "government" on an equal footing with another institution, "big business." During the1960's and 70's, government and business were presumed to exercise 'countervailing power'  to maintain a degree of health and balance in a free society. But now, a new documentary, The Corporation, acclaimed at Sundance, shows the personality of a typical corporation to be that of a psychopath. This is a real double tragedy for the American family!
FILM REVIEW
The Corporation
Mark Achbar's and Jennifer Abbot's documentary
Reviewed by Michael Wilmington
The Chicago Tribune
EXCERPT: Achbar and Abbott and writers Harold Crooks and Joel Bakan developed the film from a book by Bakan, and the title of that book, "The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power," plainly reveal this film's agenda and theme.
Is it too slanted? Most of us, asked whether modern corporations are mostly beneficial or malign, would probably answer: "Both." On the one hand, corporations employ many of us, manufacture many useful consumer products, help generate scientific advances and medical breakthroughs, and have brought the American standard of living to an all-time high. They also deliver most of the movies we watch and the pop culture we imbibe.
But some rob, steal and defraud their stockholders, fire American workers and callously open cheap-labor factories over the border or overseas, pollute or damage the environment, seduce or buy the political establishment for their own gain and churn out unwatchable movies and idiotic pop, while devoting themselves to the pursuit of profit by whatever means necessary.
It all depends, of course on who's running them--though some of "The Corporation's" witnesses feel the blight may be systemic.
So, the film --an award-winner at many festivals from Sundance to Chicago, where it shared the 2003 "best documentary" prize--gives us history and context analysis. It offers a parade of witnesses--from Michael Moore and Noam Chomsky to whistle-blowers, academics, activists and even a few CEO's--to answer a variety of questions. Meanwhile Achbar and Abbott fill us in on the history of corporations from the watershed year of 1886 on.
In fact, one of the movie's main hooks is its ironic comparison of corporate bodies with human beings--especially pathological or criminal ones. This isn't just a facetious conceit. The rise of the modern American corporation, the film notes, was strongly encouraged by a truly bizarre 1886 Supreme Court decision, when some very persuasive corporation lawyers argued the proposition that corporations should be legally classified as "people" and should enjoy the same constitutional protections as the rest of us--including those recently broadened to protect freed black ex-slaves. And they won, the result being a solidification of a corporation's right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness--or, in this case, profits.
Over and over, "The Corporation's" interviewees give examples of much modern corporate mischief and misbehavior (along with some good deeds), ranging from the excesses of an Enron to the stifling of a couple of investigative reporters at Fox News. And several times, they ask implicitly, whether a person who behaved like this would be regarded as a suitable case for treatment.
That the filmmakers--including Achbar's suggestively named co-producer Bart Simpson--already know the answer may be the film's main flaw. But that doesn't mean this is just another politicized documentary preaching to the anti-establishment choir. It's a movie so chock full of information, so dense with context and analysis that it will keep you thinking and reacting, no matter what your bent or slant--and no matter where you stand on the world-wide corporate ladder.
SEE ALSO: The Lunatic You Work For (The Economist.com)
SEE ALSO: AUDIO LINK NPR's Morning Edition and Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan has a review of The Corporation.
SEE ALSO: BOOK REVIEW
Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President
by Justin A. Frank
Review by Publishers Weekly
EXCERPT: Bush Administration policies are not only a "great catastrophe" but the products of a disturbed mind, according to this provocative blend of psychological case-study and partisan polemic. Psychoanalyst Frank sifts through family memoirs, the writings of critics like Al Franken and David Corn and the public record of Bush’s personal idiosyncrasies for clues to the President’s character, interpreting the evidence in the rigidly Freudian framework of child psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. He finds that Bush, psychically scarred by an absentee father and a cold, authoritarian mother, has developed a galloping case of megalomania, characterized by a Manichaean worldview, delusions of persecution and omnipotence and an "anal/sadistic" indifference to others’ pain, with removal from office the only "treatment option." The author’s exegesis of Bush’s personality traits-the drinking problem, the bellicose rhetoric, the verbal flailings and misstatements of fact, the religiosity and exercise routines, the hints of dyslexia and hyperactivity, the youthful cruelty to animals and schoolmates, the smirk-paints an intriguing, if exaggerated and contemptuous, portrait of a possibly troubled public figure.

Falling Corporate Tax Revenues Push Budget Deficits Even Higher
Economic Policy Institute, 14 July 2004
EXCERPT: Since 2000, the bulk of federal tax cuts have applied to the individual income tax. The effect of these cuts on the deterioration of the federal budget outlook has been a prominent controversy in economic policy. Less noticed has been the erosion of proceeds from the corporate income tax. Tax bills pending in Congress are projected to further deplete revenues and raise budget deficits. As a share of profits, the postwar average of federal, state, and local corporate income tax revenues is 37%. In the late 1940s, it was as high as 55%. As Figure 1 shows, after some leveling off between 1969 and 1981, the corporate income tax share of profits has stayed well below 37%. After 2000, it dropped by more than a third, from 32% to 20%.
SEE ALSO:
AUDIO LINK
Is the American Dream ... Fair?
Robert Reich
Market Place On-Line, 14 July 2004
EXCERPT: As many Russian tycoons resign themselves to share more of their wealth with the state...here in America, critics complain the wealthy are sharing less these days. This is not just an issue of tax policy, argues Commentator Robert Reich...he claims when it comes to the American Dream, workers aren't getting a fair serving.
Listen Now

Thomas Frank on the Failure of Liberalism
TomDispatch.com, 15 July 2004
EXCERPT:
Oh Kansas fools! Poor Kansas fools!
The banker makes of you a tool.
These lines from a populist song of 1892 are the epigraph for Thomas Frank's new book, What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America. They are a small reminder that Kansas, Frank's "homeland," the state where he grew up, was once part of the great progressive heart of this country. Going home again, he observes a simple fact of the voting map: "The more working-class an area is, the more likely it is to be conservative." His observation: "This situation is the opposite of what it was thirty years ago. And it is the complete negation of the Kansas of one hundred years ago, when those in the hardest-hit areas were the most desperate -- and the most radical." How, Frank asks, could this have happened? His book is an exploration of just how hard hit Kansas has been in an era of ever more right-wing Republican administrations and ever-rightward drifting Democratic ones; of how a right-wing war against a fantasy "liberal power elite" was successfully waged, and why it is that people seem to vote against what once would have been considered their interests. It's really a must-read. ...Below in a piece adapted by Frank for Tomdispatch from part of his book's conclusion, he considers the fall of liberalism in America.

All Together Now
By BARBARA EHRENREICH
New York Times, 15 July 2004
EXCERPT: Groupthink has become as American as apple pie and prisoner abuse; in fact, it's hard to find any thinking these days that doesn't qualify for the prefix "group." Our standardized-test-driven schools reward the right answer, not the unsettling question. Our corporate culture prides itself on individualism, but it's the "team player" with the fixed smile who gets to be employee of the month. In our political culture, the most crushing rebuke is to call someone "out of step with the American people." Zip your lips, is the universal message, and get with the program. ...I trace the current outbreak of droidlike conformity to the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when groupthink became the official substitute for patriotism, and we began to run out of surfaces for affixing American flags. Bill Maher lost his job for pointing out that, whatever else they were, the 9/11 terrorists weren't cowards, prompting Ari Fleischer to warn (though he has since backed down) that Americans "need to watch what they say." Never mind that Sun Tzu says, somewhere in his oeuvre, that while it's soothing to underestimate the enemy, it's often fatal, too. ...As Fred Alford, a political scientist who studies the fate of whistle-blowers, puts it: "We need to understand in this `land of the free and home of the brave' that most people are scared to death. About 50 percent of all whistle-blowers lose their jobs, about half of those lose their homes, and half of those people lose their families."

Acting Chief of CIA Insists Agencies Aren't at Fault in War Debate
By DOUGLAS JEHL
New York Times, 15 July 2004
EXCERPT: The country's new acting intelligence chief said Wednesday that American intelligence agencies should not be blamed if there was inadequate debate about the decision to go to war against Iraq. Those comments, by John E. McLaughlin, were aimed at the Senate Intelligence Committee, which issued a report last week that portrayed American intelligence agencies as having exaggerated the evidence that Iraq had illicit weapons. But the comments also were an implicit retort to arguments that the Central Intelligence Agency, not President Bush, was primarily responsible for sending the country to war.
SEE ALSO:
The acting CIA director demonstrates a typical bureaucratic posture in the face of political fire. This is why the voices of  ex-CIA members should be given more prominence in the media.
AUDIO LINK
C.I.A.
Diane Rehm Show
Guest host: Syndicated columnist Steve Roberts
Acting CIA Director John McLaughlin and others join guest host Steve Roberts to talk about the Senate Intelligence Committee report on the CIA.
John McLaughlin, acting director, Central Intelligence Agency
Reuel Marc Gerecht, former Middle East specialist for the CIA and resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute
Michael O'Hanlon, senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution
Listen Now

House Panel Reviews Iraq Prison Reports
By Josh White and R. Jeffrey Smith
Washington Post, 15 July 2004
EXCERPT: Members of the House Armed Services Committee reviewed nearly two dozen confidential reports yesterday about U.S. prison operations in Iraq, documents that some Democrats said should have alerted officials to a pattern of problems and potential abuses of detainees long before the Abu Ghraib prison scandal became public earlier this year. The Pentagon provided the International Committee of the Red Cross reports to Congress beginning yesterday, allowing restricted access to about 150 pages of material that detailed prison conditions for detainees across Iraq. Members of the Senate are scheduled to have access today, although Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John W. Warner (R-Va.) told members yesterday that the ICRC documents are not a complete set. Sources said there were repetitive complaints about detainee living conditions, food, general treatment, interactions with interrogators and other humanitarian requirements, with some of the harshest criticism coming around the time of the alleged serious abuses at Abu Ghraib last fall. While those who viewed the secret reports declined to provide specific details, some Democrats on the Armed Services Committee said they felt the information was stale, tracked news reports over the past few months, and failed to describe the current state of the Iraqi prisons. Several Republican committee members did not return phone calls seeking comment yesterday afternoon.

New Evidence: Bush Misleads on Prison Abuse Scandal
The Daily Mis-Lead, 15 July 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush has claimed that the prison abuse scandal in Iraq was just "conduct by a few American troops." But with Congress investigating the scandal, a series of explosive new reports provides evidence that the tactics may have been approved at the highest levels of government. Even worse, one leading investigative journalist says the Administration is holding videotapes of soldiers sodomizing Iraqi children. According to a newly released Pentagon memo from 2002, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld personally authorized the use of controversial interrogation tactics, including using dogs to intimidate, stripping prisoners of their clothes and placing hoods on prisoners so they cannot see. Rumsfeld also ordered military officials to hold prisoners without listing them on prisoner rolls requested by the International Red Cross. And according to Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was the head of detention operations at Abu Ghraib, Rumsfeld "approved tactics at the prison" directly. As reported by Newsweek, these memos and orders were signed off by Rumsfeld, President Bush and Attorney General John Ashcroft and were part of a "secret system of detention and interrogation that opened the door to such methods" of abuse seen in Iraq.
SEE ALSO: VIDEO LINK  2004 ACLU Members Conference, "America at a Crossroads."

Medical Class Warfare
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times, 15 July 2004
EXCERPT: If past patterns are any guide, about one in three Americans will go without health insurance for some part of the next two years. They won't, for the most part, be the persistently poor, who are usually covered by Medicaid. They will be members of working families with breadwinners who have jobs without medical benefits or who have been laid off. Many Americans fear the loss of health insurance. Last week I described John Kerry's health plan. What's the Bush administration's plan? ...The difference couldn't be starker. Mr. Kerry offers a health care plan that would extend coverage to most of those now uninsured, paid for by rolling back tax cuts for those with incomes over $200,000. President Bush offers a tax credit that would extend coverage to fewer than 5 percent of the uninsured, plus a new tax break for the affluent that would actually increase the number of uninsured. As I said last week, I don't see how Mr. Bush can win this debate. 

15 July 2004

New Tax Cut Scam Excludes Poor Kids
By Robert Kuttner
Boston Globe, 14 July 2004
EXCERPT: Congressional Republicans are hoping to pass yet another budget-busting tax cut this summer and manipulate Democrats into voting for it by using poor children as the bait. In 2001 and 2003, Congress passed legislation providing a child tax credit for the middle class that gradually rose to $1,000 per child, but Republicans excluded working-class children who needed help the most. In the 2003 law, families earning between $10,500 and $26,625 got nothing, including 260,000 children of active-duty servicemen and women. All told, about one child in four was excluded. Working-class families were left out because their breadwinners are too poor to pay much federal income tax. Republicans argued that anyone who paid little or no income taxes had not earned tax relief. Of course, these families do pay sales taxes, payroll taxes, excise taxes, and property taxes. Republicans are now proposing to extend token benefits to lower-income families, but their price is a dramatic expansion of the tax breaks for well-to-do families with incomes of up to $309,000 -- that's the richest 2 percent of American families. The preexisting law wisely phased out all child tax credit benefits at family incomes of $149,000. The new Republican proposal would more than double that income ceiling at a cost to the deficit of $89 billion over 10 years. Under the Republican bill, which has already passed the House, the affluent families would get tax cuts of $1,000 per child. The poor ones would get $150 per child. Anyone with less than $10,500 would get nothing. That's almost exactly the annual income of one fulltime minimum wage earner. As fiscal policy, this is appalling, since the previous tax cuts tilted to the wealthiest already create decades of unsustainable deficits. As social policy, it is even worse -- perfect Robin Hood in reverse.

Why the Press Failed
By Orville Schell
TomDispatch.com, 14 July 2004
EXCERPT: Few in our media, it seemed, remembered I. F. Stone's hortatory admonition, "If you want to know about governments, all you have to know is two words: Governments lie." Dissenting voices in the mainstream were largely buried on back pages, ignored on op-ed pages, or confined to the margins of the media, and so denied the kinds of "respectability" that a major media outlet can confer. ...For three-plus years we have been governed by people who don't view news, in the traditional sense, as playing any constructive role in our system of governance. At the moment, they are momentarily in retreat, driven back from the front lines of faith-based truth by their own faith-based blunders. But make no mistake, their frightening experiment will continue if Americans allow it. Complete success would mean not just that the press had surrendered its essential watchdog role, but -- a far darker thought -- that, even were it to refuse to do so, it might be shunted off to a place where it would not matter.

Bush Refines Position on Gay Marriage
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
New York Times, 15 July 2004
EXCERPT: (Quoting Bush) "What they do in the privacy of their house, consenting adults should be able to do," Mr. Bush said during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania on Friday, seeking to distinguish between private behavior and giving legal sanction to same-sex marriages. "This is America. It's a free society. But it doesn't mean we have to redefine traditional marriage."
By hedging his position, if only a bit, Mr. Bush may have insulated himself somewhat from the sting of the defeat the proposed amendment suffered in the Senate on Wednesday. But the way in which the proposal went down with a whimper - short of a simple majority, much less the two-thirds of the Senate needed for approval - raised questions about whether the White House had fundamentally misjudged the nation's attitude on the issue. And the vote left even some of Mr. Bush's own advisers wondering if his backing of the amendment did not hurt him politically more than it helped by further stoking opposition to him from the left.

Election Troubles Already Descending on Florida
By ABBY GOODNOUGH
New York Times, 15 July 2004
EXCERPT: Three years after Gov. Jeb Bush announced a new voting system that he called "a model for the rest of the nation," Florida is grappling with some of the same problems that threw the 2000 presidential election into chaos, as well as new ones that critics say could cause even more confusion this November.

Report Faults USDA Testing Procedures for Mad Cow
By Johanna Neuman
LA Times in the Boston Globe, 14 July 2004
EXCERPT: The report, prepared by the USDA's Office of Inspector General and released by Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, alleges that the program has failed to test hundreds of cattle with symptoms indicating a central nervous system disorder -- a possible sign of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, or BSE, the scientific name for mad cow disease. The report also said the department has not cooperated with inspectors, has provided little documentation about the types of cows tested, and has failed to take into account that apparently healthy cattle could harbor BSE. But Dr. Ron DeHaven, administrator of the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said yesterday that ''if we want to find the disease, we should be biasing our testing toward this [high-risk] population."

Choosing Death
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
New York Times, 14 July 2004
EXCERPT: John Ashcroft and other members of the Christian right have desperately tried to eviscerate Oregon's Death With Dignity law, on the ground that it undermines the sanctity of life. They should come here and talk to people like Florence Tauber.

14 July 2004

Bush's "Reader's Digest version" of the National Intelligence Estimate is withheld
Bush and C.I.A. Won't Release Paper on Prewar Intelligence
By DOUGLAS JEHL
New York Times, 14 July 2004
EXCERPT: The White House and the Central Intelligence Agency have refused to give the Senate Intelligence Committee a one-page summary of prewar intelligence in Iraq prepared for President Bush that contains few of the qualifiers and none of the dissents spelled out in longer intelligence reviews, according to Congressional officials. Senate Democrats claim that the document could help clear up exactly what intelligence agencies told Mr. Bush about Iraq's illicit weapons. The administration and the C.I.A. say the White House is protected by executive privilege, and Republicans on the committee dismissed the Democrats' argument that the summary was significant.
The review, prepared for President Bush in October 2002, summarized the findings of a classified, 90-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq's illicit weapons. Congressional officials said that notes taken by Senate staffers who were permitted to review the document show that it eliminated references to dissent within the government about the National Intelligence Estimate's conclusions. "In determining what the president was told about the contents of the N.I.E. dealing with Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, qualifiers and all, there is nothing clearer than this single page," Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, said in a 10-page "additional view" that was published as an addendum to the Senate Intelligence Committee's report on Friday. Among the specific dissents excluded from the public white paper on Iraq's weapons was the view of the State Department's intelligence branch, spelled out in the classified version of the document, that Iraq's importation of aluminum tubes could not be conclusively tied to a continuing nuclear weapons program, as other intelligence agencies asserted. Also left out of the white paper was the view of Air Force intelligence that pilotless aerial vehicles being built by Iraq, seen by other intelligence agencies as designed to deliver chemical or biological weapons, were not suited for that purpose. ...In interviews, Democratic officials said that Republicans on the panel, which meets in closed session, had blocked their efforts to formally request the document from the White House. They also said that Democrats on the panel had tried and failed to persuade Republicans to include in the committee report a description of the one-page summary as having been an inadequate reflection of the full intelligence estimate.
SEE ALSO: How Niger Uranium Story Defied Wide Skepticism, By JAMES RISEN (NYT)

Gay Marriage Ban Divides Senate GOP
By DAVID ESPO
AP to Yahoo! News, 13 July 2004
EXCERPT: Short on votes and beset by internal divisions, Senate Republicans struggled Tuesday to salvage a respectable defeat for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, an issue that President Bush pushed toward the top of the election-year agenda.

Medicare Law Is Seen Leading to Cuts in Drug Benefits for Retirees
By ROBERT PEAR
New York Times, 14 July 2004
EXCERPT: New government estimates suggest that employers will reduce or eliminate prescription drug benefits for 3.8 million retirees when Medicare offers such coverage in 2006. That represents one-third of all the retirees with employer-sponsored drug coverage, according to documents from the Department of Health and Human Services. No aspect of the new Medicare law causes more concern among retirees than the possibility that they might lose benefits they already have. Democrats are likely to cite the new estimates as evidence to support their contention that the new law will prompt some employers to curtail drug coverage for retirees, forcing them, in some cases, to rely on Medicare's leaner benefits. Republicans do not want to see the government supplant employers in providing drug benefits to retirees.

Deficit Balloons to $326.6B So Far in 2004
By JEANNINE AVERSA
AP to Yahoo! News, 13 July 2004
EXCERPT: The government's deficit ballooned to $326.6 billion in the first nine months of the 2004 budget year, according to a snapshot of U.S. balance sheets released Tuesday. That's more than 20 percent larger than the $269.7 billion shortfall for the corresponding period last year. For the current budget year which began Oct. 1, this spending has totaled $1.73 trillion, 6.4 percent more than the same period a year ago. Revenues came to $1.40 trillion, 3.5 percent more than the previous year.

House Votes to Allow Canada Drug Imports
By IRA DREYFUSS
AP to Yahoo! News, 13 July 2004
EXCERPT: The House voted Tuesday to allow Americans to buy prescription drugs from Canada and other countries at prices lower than found in the United States, but the provision's prospects are dim to become law this year. The measure, approved as part of a $16.8 billion bill to fund the Agriculture Department and the Food and Drug Administration for next year, would prohibit the FDA from spending money to enforce its prohibition on imports of FDA-approved drugs.

Anti-War Billboard Dispute in Court
By ERIN McCLAM, Associated Press Writer
AP to Yahoo! News, 13 July 2004
EXCERPT: A dispute over a proposed anti-war billboard that would loom over Times Square during the Republican National Convention and up until Election Day landed in federal court Tuesday. The billboard, 69 feet by 44 feet, was to show a stylized bomb and fuse, decorated in stars and stripes, above the message, "Democracy is best taught by example, not by war."

This is the billboard that Clear Channel found so offensive:

Generation Debt: The New Economics of Being Young
One Sick Fall
With health insurance out of reach, a generation braces itself for the worst
by Solana Pyne
Village Voice, 13 July 2004
EXCERPT: If they're not outright poor as a class, young adults in this country are at least very, very broke. The average collegian graduates with more than $20,000 in debt, headed for a job market where real hourly wages have kept pace with neither inflation nor the cost of living. Young adults are broke in part because of their unprecedented schooling—in the latest census figures, 28 percent of those between 25 and 29 reported holding a bachelor's degree—which promised to pluck them away from the constellation of problems plaguing America's underclass, whether it was trouble with housing or inadequate medical care.
Yet there they are, these latest inheritors of the American dream, lined up in emergency rooms for toothaches and the flu, not because they're having emergencies, but because they don't have health insurance, and emergency rooms, unlike private doctors, are obliged to give them care. Since 1987, the number of uninsured young adults has grown at twice the rate of older adults, even though the demographic itself is shrinking. One-quarter to one-third of adults under 35 went without insurance for all of 2002, the most recent year for which statistics are available—an increase of 1.2 million from the year before. Half were uninsured for some part of 2002. Of the 43.6 million uninsured adults in the U.S., 41 percent are young.

13 July 2004

The CIA Did It!
TomDispatch.com, 11 July 2004
EXCERPT: The CIA did it!…or was it Colonel Mustard in the drawing room with the rope? On Friday the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee issued its 511 page report --an estimated 20% already censored out by the CIA (so assume this was the best news available) -- and as all press reports in this country indicate, it savaged the Agency. Its essential implied conclusion was that the CIA more or less single-handedly led a misinformed Congress and a misadvised administration into war. ("The committee did not find any evidence that administration officials attempted to coerce, influence or pressure [CIA] analysts to change their judgments related to Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capabilities.") The committee Democrats signed off on this and then held edgy press conferences or like House minority leader Nancy Pelosi released statements indicating that it probably wasn't this way at all. So, gee, like they used to say when I was a kid about those drawings that had five-legged cows floating through the clouds, what's wrong with this picture? To make sense of all this, it helps to compare the shameful CIA intelligence record on Saddam's Iraq to the various pretzled legal memos the Defense Department, the CIA, and others solicited from working groups of administration legal brains on the issue of torture and the president's power to create an offshore torture system. Like the CIA's October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq, with its even more doctored, unclassified public version (a White House construct which took much heat in the Committee report), these were essentially after-the-fact efforts to bolster decisions already taken or in the process of being taken by top administration officials who had, until then, largely consulted each other.
SEE ALSO: Engelhardt: The Way We Were (TomDispatch)
REVISITED: Corn: Report Proves Iraq War was Based on Lies (Nation)

Framing terror strikes as a reason to vote for Bush...
Bush Administration Prepares Plans to Postpone U.S. Elections
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek, 10 July 2004
EXCERPT: American counterterrorism officials, citing what they call "alarming" intelligence about a possible Qaeda strike inside the United States this fall, are reviewing a proposal that could allow for the postponement of the November presidential election in the event of such an attack, NEWSWEEK has learned. The prospect that Al Qaeda might seek to disrupt the U.S. election was a major factor behind last week's terror warning by Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge. Ridge and other counterterrorism officials concede they have no intel about any specific plots. But the success of March's Madrid railway bombings in influencing the Spanish elections‹as well as intercepted "chatter" among Qaeda operatives‹has led analysts to conclude "they want to interfere with the elections," says one official.
SEE ALSO: White House seizes on the right-wing myth that the Spanish election was won by al Qaeda, instead of being lost by a government that lied to its people (Progress Report)
SEE ALSO: Bush May Use Terrorism as Excuse to Delay Elections (CHB)
SEE ALSO: Nation's Liberals Suffering from Outrage Fatigue (Onion)

Analysis: President Kerry on Israel
By Gadi Dechter
United Press International, 10 July 2004
EXCERPT: A leaked draft of the Democratic Party platform and recent statements by John Kerry suggest that a Democratic White House would continue the Bush administration's enthusiastic support for Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. However, the decidedly circumspect wording of these documents do hint at subtle, but potentially significant, differences in a Kerry administration's likely policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Last month, Kerry released a position paper titled, "John Kerry: Strengthening Israel's Security and Bolstering the U.S.-Israel Special Relationship." The paper was designed to assuage concerns of pro-Israel voters still rankled by Kerry's comments during the primaries, in which he harshly criticized the Israeli construction of the barrier in the West Bank. "I know how disheartened Palestinians are by the Israeli government's decision to build a barrier off the 'Green Line,' cutting deeply into Palestinian areas," Kerry told members of the Arab-American Institute in October 2003, a month after he had announced his candidacy. "We do not need another barrier to peace." He went on to say that the barrier was a "provocative and counterproductive measure" that was not in Israel's interest. Assured of the nomination, Kerry appears to have reversed his position on the West Bank barrier, which was ruled illegal Friday by the International Court of Justice. "John Kerry supports the construction of Israel's security fence to stop terrorists from entering Israel," the June statement reads. "The security fence is a legitimate act of self-defense erected in response to the wave of terror attacks against Israeli citizens. He believes the security fence is not a matter for the International Court of Justice." In a statement released Friday evening after the court's ruling, Kerry reiterated his support for the barrier, and said he was "deeply disappointed by today's International Court of Justice ruling."

AUDIO LINK
White House Forwards Plan to Exploit Remaining Protected Forests
All Things Considered (NPR), 12 July 2004
EXCERPT: The Bush administration proposes changes to federal rules on building roads in national forests. The new proposal, put forth by Agriculture Secretary Ann Veneman, would allow roads in remote areas of forest where they have previously been banned. New roads could only be blocked if a state's governor petitions the federal government.
SEE ALSO: Administration Opens Forests to New Logging (WP)
SEE ALSO: Bush Administration Fires Park Police Chief Over Dissent (CNN)
SEE ALSO: Bush Chemical Treaty Bill Favors Industry Over Public Health (BGW)
NEW SITE: EnvironmentalHealthNews.org
SEE ALSO:
Bush Seeks Shift in Logging Rules
By FELICITY BARRINGER
New York Times, 12 July 2004
EXCERPT: The Bush administration on Monday proposed scuttling a Clinton-era rule that put nearly 60 million acres of national forest largely off limits to logging, mining or other development in favor of a new system that would leave it to governors to seek greater - or fewer - strictures on road construction in forests. The announcement abandoning the so-called roadless rule was made by Agriculture Secretary Ann M. Veneman in Boise, Idaho, where opposition to the rule issued by President Bill Clinton as he was leaving office was most pronounced. Ms. Veneman described the proposal as a way to sidestep the tangle of litigation over building roads through national forests and to improve local participation and federal flexibility in determining the use of national forests. ...A spectrum of environmental groups reacted with disappointment and outrage to the announcement.

Cheney Faces Criminal Idictment
By Teresa Hampton
Capitol Hill Blue, 8 July 2004
EXCERPT: Vice President Dick Cheney faces criminal indictments for illegal activities while CEO of energy giant Halliburton and also illegally intervened to secure a $7 billion no-bid contract for his former employer after his election to office, an analysis by the White House counsel¹s office concludes. The Vice President is currently under investigation by French authorities for bribery, money laundering and misuse of corporate assets while at Halliburton and also faces a U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission probe of a $180 million "slush fund" that may have been used to pay bribes.
SEE ALSO: Cheney's Wife Splits with Administration on Gay Marriage Issue (CHB)

On the extreme right...
Machine at Work
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times, 12 July 2004
EXCERPT: From a business point of view, Enron is a smoking ruin. But there's important evidence in the rubble. If Enron hadn't collapsed, we might still have only circumstantial evidence that energy companies artificially drove up prices during California's electricity crisis. Because of that collapse, we have direct evidence in the form of the now-infamous Enron tapes — although the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Justice Department tried to prevent their release. Now, e-mail and other Enron documents are revealing why Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, is one of the most powerful men in America. A little background: at the Republican convention, most featured speakers will be social moderates like Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger. A moderate facade is necessary to win elections in a generally tolerant nation. But real power in the party rests with hard-line social conservatives like Mr. DeLay, who, in the debate over gun control after the Columbine shootings, insisted that juvenile violence is the result of day care, birth control and the teaching of evolution. Here's the puzzle: if Mr. DeLay's brand of conservatism is so unpopular that it must be kept in the closet during the convention, how can people like him really run the party? In Mr. DeLay's case, a large part of the answer is his control over corporate cash. As far back as 1996, one analyst described Mr. DeLay as the "chief enforcer of company contributions to Republicans." Some of that cash has flowed through Americans for a Republican Majority, called Armpac, a political action committee Mr. DeLay founded in 1994. By dispensing that money to other legislators, he gains their allegiance; this, in turn, allows him to deliver favors to his corporate contributors. Four of the five Republicans on the House ethics committee, where a complaint has been filed against Mr. DeLay, are past recipients of Armpac money. The complaint, filed by Representative Chris Bell of Texas, contends, among other things, that Mr. DeLay laundered illegal corporate contributions for use in Texas elections. And that's where Enron enters the picture.

Antiwar Group Says Its Ad Is Rejected By Right Wing Media Giant Clear Channel
By RAYMOND HERNANDEZ and ANDREA ELLIOTT
New York Times, 12 July 2004
EXCERPT: A group of antiwar advocates is accusing Clear Channel Communications, one of the nation's largest media companies, with close ties to national Republicans, of preventing the group from displaying a Times Square billboard critical of the war in Iraq. The billboard - an image of a red, white and blue bomb with the words "Democracy Is Best Taught by Example, Not by War" - was supposed to go up next month, the antiwar group said, and it was to be in place when Republicans from across the country gathered in New York City to nominate President Bush for a second term.

12 July  2004

Bush's safer world...
Bush's Pre-emptive Strategy Meets Real-Time Scenarios
By DAVID E. SANGER
New York Times, 12 July 2004
EXCERPT: Even as President Bush turns his doctrine of pre-emptive action against powers threatening the United States into a campaign theme, Washington is using a far more subdued, take-it-slow approach to the dangers of unconventional weapons in Iran and North Korea. There are many reasons for the yawning gap between Mr. Bush's campaign language and the reality. One of the most important is woven throughout the searing, 511-page critique of the intelligence that led America to war last year, released Friday by the Senate Intelligence Committee. The report details, in one painful anecdote after another, misjudgments that the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies made as they put together what the committee called an "assumption train" about Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs. That same train powered Mr. Bush's own justification for a pre-emptive strike against Saddam Hussein, down to his now-discredited argument that the Iraqi leader was developing unmanned aerial vehicles capable dropping biological weapons on American troops in the Mideast, or perhaps even the United States itself. The sweeping nature of that report is already fueling a new debate over pre-emption, on the campaign trail and among the nations the United States must convince as it builds its case against North Korea and Iran. On Sunday, Senator Pat Roberts, the Republican chairman of the intelligence committee, said on NBC's "Meet the Press" that the urgency of those problems meant there was not much time to fix the intelligence community. "Let's do it very quickly," he said, "because in a dangerous world, if you're going to have a policy of pre-emption, whether it be North Korea or whether it be whatever threat we face," including a possible terror attack on the United States before the election, "we have to get it right."

Kerry Vows To Restore 'Truth' to Presidency
Democratic Ticket Assails GOP Values as 'Distorted'
By Jim VandeHei and Dan Balz
Washington Post, 11 July 2004
EXCERPT: President Bush has governed in a dishonest fashion, trampling values on every issue except fighting terrorism and leaving voters "clamoring for restoration of credibility and trust in the White House again," John F. Kerry and John Edwards said in an interview. "The value of truth is one of the most central values in America, and this administration has violated" it, Kerry said in an interview with The Washington Post aboard the Democrats' campaign plane Friday. "Their values system is distorted and not based on truth." The Democratic nominee and his running mate said it was that kind of anger toward the president that prompted entertainers at Thursday's Democratic fundraising concert in New York to attack Bush as a "cheap thug" and a killer. "Obviously some performers, in my judgment and John's, stepped over a line neither of us believes appropriate, but we can't control that," Kerry said. "On the other hand, we understand the anger, we understand the frustration." Edwards said scathing anti-Bush attacks such as the concert and Michael Moore's new film "Fahrenheit 9/11" reflect an "expression by folks with genuine feelings," adding, "Thank goodness in our country they have a right to express those feelings." ...This week alone, Kerry has criticized Bush personally in speeches for lying, professional laziness, waiting until right before the election to indict Enron Corp.'s former chief executive, Kenneth L. Lay, lacking values and even having worse hair than the two Democrats. Some advisers are privately counseling Kerry to tone down his attacks on Bush.

Demanding "truth in packaging"
Social Conservatives Want More of Their Own to Speak at the G.O.P. Convention
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK
New York Times, 11 July 2004
EXCERPT: Some prominent conservatives say they are upset at the apparent exclusion of the champions of their favorite issues from the limelight of the Republican convention in favor of more moderate members of the party. Conservatives said they were surprised to see former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California and Senator John McCain of Arizona - all moderate Republicans who oppose the proposed constitutional amendment blocking same-sex marriage - given high-profile roles at the convention, with few conservative Republicans on the list.

How to Make a Guerrilla Documentary
By ROBERT S. BOYNTON
New York Times Magazine, 11 July 2004
EXCERPT: ''Outfoxed'' has been made in secret. The film is an obsessively researched expose of the ways in which Fox News, as Greenwald sees it, distorts its coverage to serve the conservative political agenda of its owner, the media tycoon Rupert Murdoch. It features interviews with former Fox employees, leaked policy memos written by Fox executives and extensive footage from Fox News, which Greenwald is using without the network's permission. The result is an unwavering argument against Fox News that combines the leftist partisan vigor of a Michael Moore film with the sober tone and delivery of a PBS special. A large portion of the film's $300,000 budget came in the form of contributions in the range of $80,000 from both MoveOn and the Center for American Progress, the liberal policy organization founded by John Podesta, the former chief of staff for Bill Clinton; Greenwald, who is not looking to earn any money from the project, provided the rest.
A week after its New School premiere, the film will be shown throughout the country in hundreds of small local screenings, arranged by MoveOn, where people will be able to watch and discuss it. Though the existence of ''Outfoxed'' has been quietly publicized, its particular nature and content have been closely guarded for fear, Greenwald says, that Fox would try to stop the film's release by filing a copyright-infringement lawsuit. Nobody has ever made a critical documentary about a media company that uses as much footage without permission as Greenwald has, and the legal precedents governing the ''fair use'' of such material, while theoretically strong, are not well established in case law. He has retained the services of several intellectual-property lawyers and experts to help him navigate the ambiguous legal terrain. (A Fox News representative, in response to several phone calls, said that no one in the legal department was available to comment on copyright issues.)

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