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Senate Republicans Remove Rules Previously Afforded Minority Party Then Condemn Only Remaining Tactic
Resist the Filibuster Fiat
By Kevin Drum
Washington Post, 31 January 2005
...Senate Democrats have relied on filibusters to block judicial nominees far more often than have minority parties in previous congresses. But there's good reason for this: Republicans have steadily done away with every other Senate rule that allows minorities to object to judicial nominees -- rules that Republicans took full advantage of when they were the ones out of power. Originally, after Republicans gained control of the Senate in the 1994 elections and Utah Sen. Orrin Hatch assumed control of the Judiciary Committee, the rule regarding judicial nominees was this: If a single senator from a nominee's home state objected to (or "blue-slipped") a nomination, it was dead. This rule made it easy for Republicans to obstruct Clinton's nominees. But in 2001, when a Republican became president, Hatch suddenly reversed course and decided that it should take objections from both home-state senators to block a nominee. That made it harder for Democrats to obstruct George W. Bush's nominees. In early 2003 Hatch went even further: Senatorial objections were merely advisory, he said. Even if both senators objected to a nomination, it could still go to the floor for a vote. Finally, a few weeks later, yet another barrier was torn down: Hatch did away with "Rule IV," which states that at least one member of the minority has to agree in order to end discussion about a nomination and move it out of committee. These rule changes aren't a direct explanation for every Democratic filibuster. In fact, some of the filibustered judges have been approved by both of their home-state senators, so they wouldn't have been blue-slipped in any case. But Democratic frustration is still understandable. For better or worse, the Senate has long been dominated by rules that give minorities considerable power over the legislative and appointment process. The usual justification for this is that it forces compromise and curbs extremism. When Democrats were in the majority, Republicans defended these traditional Senate rules and used them freely to block judges they had strong objections to. But when they became the majority party themselves, they gradually decided the rules should no longer be allowed to get in the way of unbridled majority power. It was only after Democrats were left with no other way to object to activist judges that they resorted to their last remaining option: the filibuster.
It's arguable, of course, that none of these rules made sense in the first place. Why should home-state senators be allowed to kill nominations to a federal court? Why should minorities be allowed to block committee reports at all? The same question could also be asked about "anonymous holds," a tactic that allows a single senator to obstruct a nomination -- and one that was used extensively by Republicans during the Clinton administration. There are powerful arguments that these arcane Senate rules are fundamentally undemocratic -- arguments to which I am sympathetic. But it's harder to see any good argument for allowing the rules to be cynically changed based solely on who's in power. If one blue slip is the rule when your opponents hold the presidency, then that should be the rule when your own party holds the presidency. Ditto for the rules on reporting nominees out of committee. Given this history, fair-minded Republicans would be better advised to restore some of the rules they themselves once defended so fervently than to attempt to tear down the last one remaining. After all, no majority lasts forever. Legislators should keep in mind the question posed by Thomas More in "A Man for All Seasons" when his daughter's suitor says he would cut down every last law to get at the Devil. "And when the last law was down," More asks, "and the Devil turned round on you, where would you hide?"
Healthcare Overhaul Is Quietly Underway
by Ricardo Alonso-Zaldivar
LA Times, 31 January 2005
Emboldened by their success at the polls, the Bush administration and Republican leaders in Congress believe they have a new opportunity to move the nation away from the system of employer-provided health insurance that has covered most working Americans for the last half-century. In its place, they want to erect a system in which workers — instead of looking to employers for health insurance — would take personal responsibility for protecting themselves and their families: They would buy high-deductible "catastrophic" insurance policies to cover major medical needs, then pay routine costs with money set aside in tax-sheltered health savings accounts. Elements of that approach have been on the conservative agenda for years, but what has suddenly put it on the fast track is GOP confidence that the political balance of power has changed.
Time for Talk
The Triumph of Marketing Over Dialogue Results in a President Leading Much of the Nation Where it Doesn't Want to Go
by Deborah Tannen
Newsday, 30 January 2005
How can there be such a disjunction between the positions a majority hold on the issues and the way a majority voted, three months after a presidential election that aroused more passion than any in memory, in which basic questions about the direction of the country were at stake?  I think the answer has something to do with a failure of public discourse. The campaign aroused a lot of passion, but not a lot of discussion of the policies that would result if one or the other candidate was elected, nor of the effect these policies would have on citizens' lives. What we had during the presidential campaign was not discourse but marketing. Thanks to the dominance of television advertising, the campaign was reduced to attempts to put forth a positive image of one candidate and a negative image of the other. The only forums for substantive discussion were the three televised debates, though even these were not really discussions but snippets of condensed information, given the minutes-long allotment of time. That Bush was elected even though everyone agreed that John Kerry had outshone him in all three debates is evidence that marketing triumphed over discourse. Rather than addressing the issues, the Bush campaign repeated two simple mantras: Kerry is a flip-flopper and Bush will keep you safer in the face of blinding fear of terrorism (fear that their campaign rhetoric stoked).
...Our reluctance to risk conflict in conversation means that we aren't forced to articulate, and therefore examine, the logical underpinnings of our positions, and we rarely get the chance to engage in give-and-take with those who hold views different from our own. Even worse, when young people don't hear adults arguing politics, it reinforces their impression that politics has no relevance to their lives. Surely this plays a role in the astonishingly low voter turnout among young Americans. If we could reframe our attitudes toward talking politics and bring the subject back into our conversations, people might be reminded that elections can influence policies that affect their lives.
Many Unhappy Returns
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT via Talking Points Memo, 1 February 2005
The fight over Social Security is, above all, about what kind of society we want to have. But it's also about numbers. And the numbers the privatizers use just don't add up. Let me inflict some of those numbers on you. Sorry, but this is important...
[...the privatizers base their predictions about privatization on a 21st century of robust economic growth while they foretell Social Security's bleak future based on a 21st century of anemic economic growth -- a classic apples and oranges comparison which, if anyone were paying attention, would stop the whole debate in its tracks.--Josh Marshall, TPM]
SEE ALSO:
Time for Moral Outrage About Social Security
by Gar Alperovitz
Common Dreams, 31 January 2005
I’m a political-economist, teaching at a major university. In a recent book I’ve offered my analysis of the problems facing Social Security, along with my preferred solutions. I’d be happy to discuss these at another time, but not now. The reason? It’s become obvious to me that we are all off the mark–just about all of us: economists, politicians, pundits. And it’s not because we’ve done the arithmetic wrong.
What is missing from our analyses–and from our national conversation–is a sense of outrage. We are far too cool about the current realities, and about the implications of the various proposals–especially (but by no means limited to) those emanating from the White House. My own all too slow burning sense of outrage began when I took over management of an elderly relative’s affairs after she recently went into a nursing home in Wisconsin. I noted–and then (for the first time really) began to think about–two things. Number one was her Social Security check, which after a lifetime of work as a baker, amounted to $760 a month–up the huge sum of $11 from $749 last year. Number two was the supplemental insurance program which she pays for out of this--at a cost of $312.40 a month. That leaves her with $402.60 a month.
U.S. Judge: Guantanamo Tribunals Unconstitutional
Reuters, 31 January 2005
A U.S. judge ruled on Monday that the Guantanamo military tribunals for terrorism suspects are unconstitutional. In a setback for the Bush administration, U.S. District Judge Joyce Hens Green also ruled the prisoners at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba have constitutional protections under the law. "The court concludes that the petitioners have stated valid claims under the Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution and that the procedures implemented by the government to confirm that the petitioners are 'enemy combatants' subject to indefinite detention violate the petitioners' rights to due process of law," Green wrote. More than 540 suspects are being held at Guantanamo after being detained during the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and in other operations in the U.S. "war against terrorism." They are al Qaeda suspects and accused Taliban fighters. Bush administration attorneys argued the prisoners have no constitutional rights and their lawsuits, challenging the conditions of their confinement and seeking their release, must be dismissed. ...Her ruling probably will not be the final word on the issue. A different federal judge in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 19 dismissed the cases of seven Guantanamo prisoners on the grounds that they have no recognizable constitutional rights and are subject to the military review process. The cases could be appealed to the U.S. appeals court, and then ultimately to the U.S. Supreme Court.
First Amendment No Big Deal, Students Say
Study shows American teenagers indifferent to freedoms.
AP via MSNBC,  31 January 2005
The way many high school students see it, government censorship of newspapers may not be a bad thing, and flag burning is hardly protected free speech. It turns out the First Amendment is a second-rate issue to many of those nearing their own adult independence, according to a study of high school attitudes released Monday. The original amendment to the Constitution is the cornerstone of the way of life in the United States, promising citizens the freedoms of religion, speech, press and assembly. Yet, when told of the exact text of the First Amendment, more than one in three high school students said it goes “too far” in the rights it guarantees. Only half of the students said newspapers should be allowed to publish freely without government approval of stories. “These results are not only disturbing; they are dangerous,” said Hodding Carter III, president of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, which sponsored the $1 million study. “Ignorance about the basics of this free society is a danger to our nation’s future.”
U.S Did Not Safeguard $8.8 Billion of Iraq Money-Audit
Sun Jan 30, 2005 04:00 PM ET
By Sue Pleming
Reuters, 30 January 2005
The U.S.-led authority that governed Iraq after the 2003 invasion did not properly safeguard $8.8 billion of Iraq's own money and this lack of oversight opened up these funds to corruption, said a U.S. audit released on Sunday. The U.S. Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction was scathing in criticism of how the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) handled Iraqi money until it handed over power last June to Iraq's interim government. "The CPA provided less-than-adequate controls for approximately $8.8 billion in DFI (Development Fund for Iraq) funds provided to Iraqi ministries through the national budget process," said the report, released on the same day Iraqis voted in elections.
Cost of Iraq War Closing in on Vietnam
By Derrick Z. Jackson
Boston Globe, 28 January 2005
It is $80 billion and halfway home to Vietnam.
The fresh $80 billion just requested by President Bush pushes the war costs of Iraq and the amazing shrinking asterisk of Afghanistan (Osama been where?) past the $300 billion mark. The estimated cost of Vietnam in current dollars was $584 billion, according to the Congressional Research Office. Iraq has already cost more in current dollars than either the Civil War or World War I. It is about to pass the Korean War. We are on pace to pass Vietnam in two or three years. As Bush appears dead set on certifying Iraq's elections, even if it has the credibility of the Florida recount, his $80 billion brings us closer to certifying Iraq as, in financial terms, the most terrifying war on terror in American history.
White House Fears That the Enemy Is ... the CIA
CIA Shake-up: New director Goss (left) purged some senior officials
By Mark Hosenball
Newsweek, 7 February issue
Administration politicos cite a series of developments during last year's campaign as evidence that CIA careerists were out to get President Bush. First, not long before the Democratic convention in Boston, CIA bin Laden expert Michael Scheuer published "Imperial Hubris," an initially anonymous polemic castigating the U.S. government for misjudgments in responding to Islamic terrorism. Included in the book was a short critique of U.S. policy in Iraq. At first the agency allowed Scheuer, posing as Anonymous, to give news interviews. Scheuer says the CIA later shut down his media access, but only after stories about the book began more pointedly to cite his criticisms of agency management. Current and former agency officials say the CIA initially let Scheuer talk because it feared accusations of censorship; they say the agency moved to muzzle him when it began to look as if he was criticizing administration policy. Some Bushies believed Scheuer tried to establish contact with Democratic Party foreign-policy advisers. Both Scheuer and Rand Beers, the Kerry campaign's national-security adviser, emphatically denied this. "I voted for Bush," Scheuer, now retired from the CIA, told NEWSWEEK. "The idea that I was talking to Democrats is ludicrous."
Employers Can Get Medicare Subsidies for Lower Benefits
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 31 January 2005
The Bush administration has touched off a furious debate with new rules allowing employers to collect billions of dollars in federal subsidies for prescription drug benefits less generous than what many retirees were expecting under the new Medicare law. In theory, those retiree benefits should be at least equal in value to the new Medicare drug benefit. But that will not always be the case, according to Medicare officials, labor unions and specialists in employee benefits. In comparing retiree benefits with Medicare, the administration said, many employers will be able to ignore Medicare's catastrophic coverage, which helps people with high drug costs and accounts for about one-fourth of the annual value of the standard Medicare drug benefit, $300 out of $1,220.
Sundance Awards Go to Films on War, U.S. Immigrant
By Bob Tourtellotte
Reuters, 30 January 2005
The Sundance Film Festival gave top awards to anti-war documentary "Why We Fight" and human drama "Forty Shades of Blue" on Sunday at the end of its 10-day run. Sundance is the top U.S. festival for independent film, and a prize here means instant recognition for filmmakers. Several movies screened at the festival had an anti-war theme. "A festival like Sundance is not just a showcase for films, but is a platform for voices and ideas," said festival director Geoff Gilmore. "There are a lot of filmmakers here who are trying to talk about America in a different light." "Forty Shades of Blue" tells of a Russian woman who marries a man twice her age to immigrate to America and must come to a new understanding of herself. It earned Sundance's Grand Jury Prize for American dramas.
Director Eugene Jarecki's "Why We Fight" won the Grand Jury Prize for an American documentary with its examination of the U.S. military-industrial complex and argument that the system's survival depends on constant battle. Jarecki said in the current U.S. military culture, the world now sees America as a "saddening beacon" for hope and freedom, and that U.S. independent filmmakers gathered here were not content to allow that image to be permanent.
The Emergence of the Homeland Security State
By Nick Turse
TomDispatch, 28 January 2005
Part I: The Military Half
If you're reading this on the Internet, the FBI may be spying on you at this very moment. Under provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the Department of Justice has been collecting e-mail and IP (a computer's unique numeric identifier) addresses, without a warrant, using trap-and-trace surveillance devices ("pen-traps"). Now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Justice's principle investigative arm, may be monitoring the web-surfacing habits of Internet users -- also without a search warrant -- that is, spying on you with no probable cause whatsoever.
VIDEO LINK
The Power of Nightmares
Written and Produced by Adam Curtis
 BBC Documentary via Information Clearing House, October 2004
Courtesy of ag.
A careful analysis and comparison of the intellectual origins of Islamic Terrorism and Bush Neoconservative policy. Graphically depicts the disastrous results of conceptualizing the world in terms of 'good' and 'evil.' (Sound quality is better in RealAudio. A full transcript is provided and we recommend reading along.)
SEE ALSO:
Is Al Qaeda Just a Bush Boogeyman?
Robert Scheer
LA Times, 11 January 2005
Is it conceivable that Al Qaeda, as defined by President Bush as the center of a vast and well-organized international terrorist conspiracy, does not exist? To even raise the question amid all the officially inspired hysteria is heretical, especially in the context of the U.S. media's supine acceptance of administration claims relating to national security. Yet a brilliant new BBC film produced by one of Britain's leading documentary filmmakers systematically challenges this and many other accepted articles of faith in the so-called war on terror. "The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear," a three-hour historical film by Adam Curtis recently aired by the British Broadcasting Corp., argues coherently that much of what we have been told about the threat of international terrorism "is a fantasy that has been exaggerated and distorted by politicians. It is a dark illusion that has spread unquestioned through governments around the world, the security services and the international media." Stern stuff, indeed. But consider just a few of the many questions the program poses along the way...
SEE ALSO:
The Neo-Cons: From Holocaust to Hyperpower
by Jim Lobe
Common Dreams, 27 January 2005
"For those of us who are involved in foreign and defense policy today, my generation, the defining moment of our history was certainly the Holocaust," former Defense Policy Board (DPB) chairman Richard Perle, a central figure in the U.S. neo-conservative network, told BBC as U.S. forces drove toward Iraq two years ago. To Perle, who like many neo-conservatives is Jewish (although most U.S. Jews are not neo-conservatives), the Holocaust is irrefutable proof of the existence of "evil" -- a word that recurs frequently in their discourse. World events are viewed as a perpetual battle between, as one of their heroes Reinhold Niebuhr called it, "the children of light" and the "children of darkness". In the last century, "totalitarianism", whether of the right or the left, was the evil. But, as noted by the highest-ranking neo-conservative in the Bush administration in a talk late last year, evil never dies and now takes the form of what some call "Islamo-fascism". ...For neo-conservatives, the fact that the United States played a decisive role in the defeat of the evils of Nazism, fascism, and communism in the last century offers compelling, if not conclusive, evidence of its redemptive, beneficial, and "exceptional" mission in world affairs. It justifies the idea that its freedom to act should not be constrained by multilateral organizations or even international law if evil is abroad. International politics, then -- conceived as a battleground between good and evil --presents a moral challenge for neo-conservatives that transcends simple legalisms...
A former neo-conservative, the late New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, once cited this tendency as the reason he broke with the movement in the 1980s. "They wished for a military posture approaching mobilization; they would create or invent whatever crises were required to bring this about", he wrote. And thus Perle, in his 2004 book, "An End to Evil", pulled no punches in laying out the stakes in the current "war on terrorism". "For us, terrorism remains the great evil of our time, and the war against this evil, our generation's great cause. ... There is no middle way for Americans: it is victory or holocaust".
AUDIO/VIDIO LINK
Code Names: A Look Behind Secret U.S. Military Plans in the Middle East, Africa and at Home
 DemocracyNow!, 27 January 2005
We speak with military analyst, William Arkin, author of the new book Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World. It identifies 3,000 once-secret code names and details the plans and missions they stand for. Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News describes the book as "perhaps the most concentrated act of defiance of official secrecy policies since Howard Morland wrote about the H Bomb Secret in the Progressive in 1979." [includes rush transcript]
Security Nominee Gave Advice to the C.I.A. on Torture Laws
By DAVID JOHNSTON, NEIL A. LEWIS and DOUGLAS JEHL
NYT, 29 January 2005
Michael Chertoff, who has been picked by President Bush to be the homeland security secretary, advised the Central Intelligence Agency on the legality of coercive interrogation methods on terror suspects under the federal anti-torture statute, current and former administration officials said this week.
More from the ministry of propaganda
Third Journalist Was Paid to Promote Bush Policies
By ANNE E. KORNBLUT
NYT, 29 January 2005
The Bush administration acknowledged on Friday that it had paid a third conservative commentator, and at least two departments said they were conducting internal inquiries to see if other journalists were under government contract. The investigative arm of Congress also formally began an inquiry of its own. The Department of Health and Human Services confirmed having hired Michael McManus, who writes a weekly syndicated column and is director of a nonprofit group called Marriage Savers. Mr. McManus was paid $10,000 to help train counselors about marriage, an arrangement first reported in USA Today, but officials said he was paid for his expertise rather than to write columns supporting administration policies. ...Senator Frank R. Lautenberg, a New Jersey Democrat who has demanded several investigations into the so-called "payola" practices, welcomed the Government Accountability Office inquiry. "The issue here isn't just whether a journalist violated ethics," Mr. Lautenberg said, "but whether the Bush administration broke the law. If the G.A.O. finds that the payment to Armstrong Williams was an illegal use of taxpayer dollars, then the money should be returned and Education Department officials should be held accountable."
SEE ALSO:
Leave No Cartoon Behind
Earl Hadley
TomPaine.com, 28 January 2005
In late January, the new education secretary made headlines for criticizing a children's program on PBS which features an animated rabbit visiting a real family headed by lesbian parents. The Campaign for America's Future's Earl Hadley wonders where Secretary Spellings' priorities are. Working families around the country are struggling to pay for college. Two days before Christmas, the administration announced that it would enforce a change in the Pell grant funding formula that will eliminate Pell Grants for nearly 100,000 students and cut the aid for more than one million students. How about focusing on that?
Global Warming is 'Twice as Bad as Previously Thought'
lndependent/UK via Common Dreams, 27 January 2005
Global warming might be twice as catastrophic as previously thought, flooding settlements on the British coast and turning the interior into an unrecognizable tropical landscape, the world's biggest study of climate change shows. Researchers from some of Britain's leading universities used computer modeling to predict that under the "worst-case" scenario, London would be under water and winters banished to history as average temperatures in the UK soar up to 20C higher than at present.
SEE ALSO:
Oil Firms Fund Campaign to Deny Climate Change
by David Adam,
Guardian (UK) via CorpWatch.org, 27 January 2005
Lobby groups funded by the US oil industry are targeting Britain in a bid to play down the threat of climate change and derail action to cut greenhouse gas emissions, leading scientists have warned.
Chile's Retirees Find Shortfall in Private Plan
By LARRY ROHTER
NYT, 27 January 2005
Nearly 25 years ago, Chile embarked on a sweeping experiment that has since been emulated, in one way or another, in a score of other countries. Rather than finance pensions through a system to which workers, employers and the government all contributed, millions of people began to pay 10 percent of their salaries to private investment accounts that they controlled. Under the Chilean program - which President Bush has cited as a model for his plans to overhaul Social Security - the promise was that such investments, by helping to spur economic growth and generating higher returns, would deliver monthly pension benefits larger than what the traditional system could offer. But now that the first generation of workers to depend on the new system is beginning to retire, Chileans are finding that it is falling far short of what was originally advertised under the authoritarian government of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
Congressional Study Notes Ways to Collect Billions More in Taxes
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
NYT, 28 January 2005
Many of the report's recommendations are likely to run into stiff opposition from powerful interest groups, and many would arouse widespread anger among ordinary citizens. For example, the report said the government could raise $164 billion over 10 years by changing the laws that exempt from payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare a variety of fringe benefits, including employer-paid health insurance and child care assistance. Many of the report's recommendations are likely to run into stiff opposition from powerful interest groups, and many would arouse widespread anger among ordinary citizens. For example, the report said the government could raise $164 billion over 10 years by changing the laws that exempt from payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare a variety of fringe benefits, including employer-paid health insurance and child care assistance. The report also estimated that the government could raise $57 billion over the next decade by making it harder for self-employed people to avoid payroll taxes. And it said the government could raise $10.5 billion by expanding the federal tax on telephone service to cover data transfer over the Internet. In principle, the United States has a tougher corporate tax system than many other countries have because it uses a "worldwide" approach that imposes taxes on profits of American companies regardless of where those profits are earned. European corporations are subjected to a "territorial" tax system that does not tax profits on foreign operations. But in practice, the Joint Committee on Taxation said, American corporations almost permanently defer their taxes by keeping money outside the United States in low-tax countries like Ireland or India. "By maintaining deferral indefinitely, a taxpayer can achieve a result that is economically equivalent to 100 percent exemption of income," the report said, referring to a company's foreign income.
Little Black Lies
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 28 January 2005
Social Security privatization really is like tax cuts, or the Iraq war: the administration keeps on coming up with new rationales, but the plan remains the same. President Bush's claim that we must privatize Social Security to avert an imminent crisis has evidently fallen flat. So now he's playing the race card.
Federal union busting resisted
4 Unions Sue Over New Rules for Homeland Security Workers
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 28 January 2005
Four unions filed suit on Thursday to prevent the Bush administration from carrying out the first phase of a personnel system that would give officials sweeping power to reward, punish and reassign federal employees. The suit was filed by career employees of the Homeland Security Department, challenging rules it issued on Wednesday. White House officials said the new procedures, affecting 110,000 employees, were a model for changes throughout the federal government.
U.S. Backs Off Relaxing Rules for Big Media
By STEPHEN LABATON
NYT, 28 January 2005
Media companies hoping to expand their television station holdings and to own both TV stations and newspapers in the same markets suffered a setback yesterday when the Bush administration decided to abandon its challenge to a ruling that blocked the relaxation of ownership rules. The Justice Department will not ask the Supreme Court to consider a decision last year by a federal appeals court in Philadelphia that sharply criticized the move toward deregulation and ordered the Federal Communications Commission to reconsider its action. The decision is a final slap to Michael K. Powell, the departing chairman of the F.C.C., who had advocated the changes. It also throws into question the future of newspapers and TV stations owned by the Tribune Company and Media General, which made acquisitions in anticipation of further deregulation. Tribune's media acquisitions in Los Angeles, New York, Hartford and South Florida would violate the old rules, as would Media General's in Florence, S.C., and Panama City, Fla.
Bush and Kerry at Odds Over Health Care
By ANNE KORNBLUT and SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
NYT, 28 January 2005
In a reprise of the presidential campaign, President Bush and Senator John Kerry offered dueling visions of health care on Thursday. It was their most direct back-and-forth - from two different cities - over any domestic issue since Election Day. Mr. Bush traveled to Ohio to promote medical savings accounts and expanded information technology for doctors and patients, while Mr. Kerry, his former Democratic opponent, advanced his own health care proposal in Washington and attacked Mr. Bush's plan as "window dressing."
For Responsibility, Accountability and Integrity
NO Votes On Rice Confirmation
Akaka (D-HI)
Bayh (D-IN)
Boxer (D-CA)
Byrd (D-WV)
Dayton (D-MN)
Durbin (D-IL)
Harkin (D-IA)
Jeffords (I-VT)
Kennedy (D-MA)
Kerry (D-MA)
Lautenberg (D-NJ)
Levin (D-MI)
Reed (D-RI)

For Impunity: 85 Others

SEE ALSO:
 Have the Democrats Learned Nothing?
Salazar and Obama: Two Dismal Debuts
By NIRANJAN RAMAKRISHNAN
CounterPunch, 26 January 2005
Both Barack Obama (D-Ill) and Ken Salazar (D-Co) had excellent opportunities this week to strike a blow for America. They appear, instead, to have limited themselves to a narrow view of their roles. At a crucial time, both failed to stand up and be counted -- one sparklingly, and the other bumbling.
The lone black member of the current senate could not bring himself to vote against Condoleezza Rice for Secretary of State. Obama, who took only a minute to take apart Condi Rice's high rhetoric conflating tyranny and terror, stopped short of ascribing mendacity, and even if he thought doing so was discourteous, there was no compulsion to end up voting for her confirmation anyway. This was sad enough. But any allegation that he let Ms. Rice's color influence him is probably untrue. For he exploded this canard, stopping at the perimeter of political risk, or as Clinton famously called it, "maintaining viability within the system". We didn't, after all, see Obama stand with Barbara Boxer to challenge the Ohio vote and a decry an election where thousands of black people were effectively denied the vote.
As to the ponderous Salazar, who reminds one of nothing so much as the unlamented Phil Gramm, he discovered himself more Hispanic than Democratic at a crucial juncture; where was the need to chaperone Alberto "What Geneva Conventions?" Gonzales to the latter's Senate hearing? But Salazar showed that his obsequious behavior is not based on race. All the President's men (and women), regardless of either ineptitude or wilful malfeasance, can expect to receive the same elaborate courtesy from the newest "can't we all just get along" Democrat, whose feared propensity to become the next Nighthorse-Campbell assumed greater momentum the moment he opened his mouth during the Rice Confirmation debate in the Senate. Salazar intoned the usual platitudes to exalt Rice's 'unique' qualifications: "Highly qualified, inspiring life-story, long experience, high intelligence...".
Perhaps so, Senator Salazar. But there are many who would fit that description. On the other hand, how many can boast of these other qualifications: "...lied to the Senate, cheated the American people, took us to an needless war, failed to defend us on 9-11..."
Controversial Attorney General Nominee Squeaks Past First Vote
by Jim Lobe
Common Dreams, 26 January 2005
Riding over opposition from its Democratic members, the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday voted 10-8 to send the nomination of Attorney General-designate Alberto Gonzales to the full Senate for confirmation, possibly as early as next week. In another widely anticipated victory for Pres. George W. Bush, his former national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, easily won confirmation as the new secretary of state today, in an 85-13 vote. The nation's leading human and civil rights groups, including Human Rights Watch (HRW), Human Rights First (HRF, formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights) and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, are urging the Senate to reject Gonzales on the basis of his advice regarding the treatment of detainees in the Bush administration's ”war on terror”. The Leadership Conference recognises the historic significance of Mr. Gonzales' appointment as the first Hispanic American to serve as attorney-general,” said Wade Henderson, LCCR executive director. However, ”we remain unconvinced that Mr. Gonzales would independently enforce the law, rather than continue to simply rationalise it, as he did while serving then-Governor and now President Bush,” he added. In separate statements, HRW and HRF noted that it was the first time they were opposing a Cabinet-level nomination since they came into existence more than a quarter century ago. ”Mr. Gonzales is a talented and experienced lawyer with an inspiring personal history,” said Michael Posner, HRF's founder and director. ”But he helped to open the door to abuses that have undermined discipline in the military, put American fighting men and women at greater risk, and denied the United States the moral high ground.” ”For over 25 years, Human Rights Watch has worked to stamp out torture around the world,” HRW declared in a statement issued Monday. ”That struggle has been made harder by the legal positions adopted by the Bush administration, including Mr. Gonzales' refusal to state that a President could not lawfully order torture.
He [Bush] looked out of it yesterday when asked why his foreign policy is so drastically different from the one laid out in Foreign Affairs magazine in 2000 by Ms. Rice - a preview that did not emphasize promoting democracy and liberty around the world. "I didn't read the article," Mr. Bush said. Why should he? Robert McNamara never read the Pentagon Papers. Why should W. bone up on his own foreign policy? Freedom means the freedom to be free from reading what you promise voters and other stuff. I could make that case - if the price was right.
     --Love for Sale
        By MAUREEN DOWD
        NYT, 27 January 2005

A Degrading Policy
Washington Post, 26 January 2005
ALBERTO R. GONZALES was vague, unresponsive and misleading in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Bush administration's detention of foreign prisoners. In his written answers to questions from the committee, prepared in anticipation of today's vote on his nomination as attorney general, Mr. Gonzales was clearer -- disturbingly so, as it turns out. According to President Bush's closest legal adviser, this administration continues to assert its right to indefinitely hold foreigners in secret locations without any legal process; to deny them access to the International Red Cross; to transport them to countries where torture is practiced; and to subject them to treatment that is "cruel, inhumane or degrading," even though such abuse is banned by an international treaty that the United States has ratified. In effect, Mr. Gonzales has confirmed that the Bush administration is violating human rights as a matter of policy.

An 'Integrity Crisis' in the shape of a mushroom cloud
In Senate, Democrats Assail Rice and U.S. Policy in Iraq
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG and JOEL BRINKLEY
NYT, 26 January 2005
The debate came as the administration said it would request an additional $80 billion in spending to cover the continuing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq through September - a request that is likely to receive intense scrutiny on Capitol Hill. "I don't like to impugn anyone's integrity, but I really don't like being lied to repeatedly, flagrantly, intentionally," said Senator Mark Dayton, Democrat of Minnesota. "It's wrong; it's undemocratic; it's un-American; and it's very dangerous. It is very, very dangerous. And it is occurring far too frequently in this administration."
Words like "crisis" and "bankruptcy" not strong enough
Senators Urge Bush to Sell Overhaul of Social Security
By DAVID E. ROSENBAUM
NYT, 25 January 2005
After a meeting with President Bush on Tuesday, Republican senators said they had cautioned him that the drive to change the Social Security system was faltering because the public was not convinced that a fundamental overhaul was necessary. The senators said Mr. Bush responded by promising to make a strong case in his State of the Union Message on Feb. 2 and to lead the charge to win public support.
Bush Aides Say Budget Deficit Will Rise Again
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS
NYT, 26 January 2005
The White House announced on Tuesday that the federal budget deficit was expected to rise this year to $427 billion, a figure that includes a new request from President Bush to help pay for the war in Iraq. The White House's announcement makes it the fourth straight year in which the budget deficit was expected to grow; as recently as last July the administration had predicted that the deficit, which was $412 billion last year, would fall this year to $331 billion.
Another shill exposed...
Writer Backing Bush Plan Had Gotten Federal Contract
By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post, 26 January 2005
In 2002, syndicated columnist Maggie Gallagher repeatedly defended President Bush's push for a $300 million initiative encouraging marriage as a way of strengthening families. "The Bush marriage initiative would emphasize the importance of marriage to poor couples" and "educate teens on the value of delaying childbearing until marriage," she wrote in National Review Online, for example, adding that this could "carry big payoffs down the road for taxpayers and children." But Gallagher failed to mention that she had a $21,500 contract with the Department of Health and Human Services to help promote the president's proposal. Her work under the contract, which ran from January through October 2002, included drafting a magazine article for the HHS official overseeing the initiative, writing brochures for the program and conducting a briefing for department officials.
Religious Right takes no prisoners
No Comparison
Republicans say they’re no worse than early ’90s Democrats. Don’t believe it.
By Sam Rosenfeld
The American Prospect, 25 January 2005
Republicans have long peddled the moral-equivalence line in order to rationalize their behavior in the majority as just deserts and to characterize all Democratic complaints as sour grapes. The mainstream acceptance of the notion that the Jim Wright-Tom Foley era was some cesspool of moral lassitude and institutional autocracy only serves to frame contemporary Republican practices as a natural progression in a political cycle, a version of politics as usual. It behooves Democrats seeking to revive their party’s fortunes through a reformist appeal to challenge this received wisdom -- not the least because, in fact, it’s utter nonsense.
There are two components of the majority “arrogance” one hears about: autocratic rule and corruption. On both counts, the claim of moral equivalence between the later Democratic majorities and the modern GOP congress is unfounded. Regarding institutional tyranny -- the use of procedural powers to squelch deliberation and marginalize minority input -- a brilliant Boston Globe series on the modern Republican Congress should have silenced the moral-equivalence crowd forevermore. As reporter Susan Milligan and her team documented in October, by any and all measures of majority autocracy, the modern GOP brooks no comparison. Conference committees added 3,407 pork projects -- never subject to any debate or amendments -- to the 2004 appropriations bills, compared with 47 additions to the final budget passed under Democratic control a decade ago. The House leadership allowed floor amendments for about half the proportion of all legislation last year that the Democratic majority allowed to be amended in the final Congress it controlled.

New Study Criticizes Painkiller Marketing
Arthritis Drug Ads A Factor in Overuse
By Marc Kaufman
Washington Post, 25 January 2005
A majority of the patients who were persuaded to use prescription arthritis drugs such as Celebrex and Vioxx would have done just as well on older, cheaper medications and would have avoided the potential risks of heart attack and stroke now linked to those blockbuster drugs, according to a study of how they were marketed and used. ...The United States is one of only two industrialized nations that allow direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising; the other is New Zealand. The rules guiding the advertising were dramatically loosened in 1997, when drug companies were allowed to run some ads that do not disclose side effects but direct patients to Web sites, telephone numbers and their doctors for information on possible problems that are often vaguely described.
Once a joke, oversight by Congress becomes a nonentity
Reports on Pentagon's New Spy Units Set Off Questions in Congress
By DOUGLAS JEHL and ERIC SCHMITT
NYT 25 January 2005
Senior members of Congress said Monday that they would seek to determine whether the Pentagon had overstepped its bounds by creating new secret battlefield intelligence units within the Defense Intelligence Agency. ...In general, the secret missions carried out by the military have been defined as clandestine operations, which are not intended to be officially deniable and are subject to less rigorous rules for approval and oversight. ...Senator Roberts, the Kansas Republican, said he believed that the military's intelligence-gathering responsibilities should extend beyond current combat zones. "In today's environment, basically what you want to have is the groundwork for intelligence operations in any country which you deem to be a national security threat," he said. "I don't think the military should be wandering all over the globe, but I don't think they're doing that."
Outfoxing SOX
Sarbanes-Oxley banned sweetheart loans to greedy executives. So, corporations are giving them free money instead.
By Michelle Leder
Slate, 24 January 2004
Greedy corporate executives were briefly constrained by Sarbanes-Oxley, the federal legislation passed two and a half years ago in response to massive abuses at Enron, WorldCom, and others. But wily CEOs are now devising clever new methods to circumvent one of SOX's most popular provisions: the ban on sweetheart loans to executives and directors. In the old days, companies regularly made loans to the likes of Dennis Kozlowski, the former CEO of Tyco who's currently on trial (for the second time). He received a $61 million relocation loan pre-SOX. Bernie Ebbers, the former WorldCom chieftain who's also now on trial, owed his company just over $400 million at one point. Largely because of these abuses, Sarbanes-Oxley outlawed such favorable loans. But now companies have realized they can avoid the ban if they give money away to their top executives instead of loaning it.
Just the Right Amount of God
George Bush delivers the most philosophical inaugural address ever.
by Joseph Bottum
Weekly Standard, 31 January issue

Survey Finds Church-Going Americans Less Tolerant
by Michael Conlon
Reuters via Common Dreams, 23 January 2005
Church-going Americans have grown increasingly intolerant in the past four years of politicians making compromises on such hot issues as abortion and gay rights, according to a survey released on Saturday. At the same time, those polled said they were growing bolder about pushing their beliefs on others -- even at the risk of offending someone.
SEE ALSO:
The Hidden Passages in Bush's Inaugural Address
by Matthew Rothchild
The Progressive, 23 January 2005
Bush’s Inaugural Address contained many explicit references to God, but there were even more hidden allusions to the Bible that may have been lost to many in his audience, as they were to me, before I did some research. The subtle subtext of his speech carries with it a profoundly disturbing message about the separation of church and state in this country. Here are a few of the hidden passages.
Gonzales: Did He Help Bush Keep His DUI Quiet?
By Michael Isikoff
Newsweek, 31 January issue
Senate Democrats put off a vote on White House counsel Alberto Gonzales's nomination to be attorney general, complaining he had provided evasive answers to questions about torture and the mistreatment of prisoners. But Gonzales's most surprising answer may have come on a different subject: his role in helping President Bush escape jury duty in a drunken-driving case involving a dancer at an Austin strip club in 1996.
Republican focus groups pick 'definitions' and 'facts'
 Semantics Shape Social Security Debate
Democrats Assail 'Crisis' While GOP Gives 'Privatization' a 'Personal' Twist
By Mike Allen
Washington Post, 23 January 2005
President Bush is trying to keep the word "private" from going public. As the two parties brace for the coming debate over restructuring Social Security, polls and focus groups for both sides have shown that voters -- especially older ones, who vote in disproportionately heavy numbers -- distrust any change that has the word "private" attached to it.
Cable News Dismissed and Ridiculed Inauguration Protesters
Media Matters, January 2005
During January 20 inauguration coverage, hosts and commentators on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News ridiculed inauguration protesters; downplayed their numbers and significance; and implied that they posed a security threat.

One true believer is apprehensive...
Way Too Much God
by Peggy Noonan
The Wall Street Journal, 21 January 2005
The president's speech seemed rather heavenish. It was a God-drenched speech. This president, who has been accused of giving too much attention to religious imagery and religious thought, has not let the criticism enter him. God was invoked relentlessly. "The Author of Liberty." "God moves and chooses as He wills. We have confidence because freedom is the permanent hope of mankind . . . the longing of the soul." It seemed a document produced by a White House on a mission. ...And yet such promising moments were followed by this, the ending of the speech. "Renewed in our strength--tested, but not weary--we are ready for the greatest achievements in the history of freedom."
This is--how else to put it?--over the top. It is the kind of sentence that makes you wonder if this White House did not, in the preparation period, have a case of what I have called in the past "mission inebriation." A sense that there are few legitimate boundaries to the desires born in the goodness of their good hearts.
One wonders if they shouldn't ease up, calm down, breathe deep, get more securely grounded. The most moving speeches summon us to the cause of what is actually possible. Perfection in the life of man on earth is not.
Few but Organized, Iraq Veterans Turn War Critics
By NEELA BANERJEE
NYT, 23 January 2005
Sean Huze enlisted in the Marine Corps right after the Sept. 11 attacks and was, in his own words, "red, white and blue all the way" when he deployed to Iraq 16 months later. Unquestioning in his support of the invasion, he grew irritated when his father, a former National Guardsman, expressed doubts about the war. Today, all that has changed. Haunted by the civilian casualties he witnessed, Corporal Huze has become one of a small but increasing number of Iraq veterans who have formed or joined groups to oppose the war or to criticize the way it is being fought. The two most visible organizations - Operation Truth, of which Corporal Huze is a member, and Iraq Veterans Against the War - were founded only last summer but are growing in membership and sophistication. The Internet has helped them spread their word and galvanize like-minded people in ways unimaginable to activist veterans of previous generations, who are also lending help.  "There's strength in numbers," Corporal Huze said. "By ourselves, we're lone voices, a whisper in a swarm of propaganda out there. Combined, we can become a roar and have an impact on the issues that we care about." Those who turn to the groups are generally united in their disillusionment, though their responses to the war vary: Iraq Veterans seeks a quick withdrawal from Iraq; Operation Truth focuses on the day-to-day issues affecting troops and veterans.
Kennedy: Fascist America
by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman
Common Dreams, 22 January 2005
"There is no difference between the reaction I get from Republicans and Democrats, because Americans share the same values," Kennedy told us. "If you talk about these issues in terms of our national values, everybody understands it." In the book, Kennedy implies that we live in a fascist country and that the Bush White House has learned key lessons from the Nazis.
"While communism is the control of business by government, fascism is the control of government by business," he writes. "My American Heritage Dictionary defines fascism as '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.' Sound familiar?" ..."The biggest threat to American democracy is corporate power," Kennedy told us. "There is vogue in the White House to talk about the threat of big government. But since the beginning of our national history, our most visionary political leaders have warned the American public against the domination of government by corporate power. That warning is missing in the national debate right now.
E.P.A. Offers an Amnesty if Big Farms Are Monitored
By MICHAEL JANOFSKY
NYT, 22 January 2005
The Environmental Protection Agency said on Friday that it would shield operators of large livestock operations from prosecution from air pollution violations if they participated in a new program to collect emissions data from their farms. The information gathered from the participants would be used to determine which of the thousands of factory farms, known as animal feeding operations or A.F.O.'s, violate the Clean Air Act or other environmental laws. The voluntary program is a stark departure from the current strategy of focused prosecutions. As an inducement to join it, the agency assures operators that they will not be sued for current violations during the program's two years of monitoring. ..."This deal is too soft, it takes too long, and the public should feel betrayed," Bill Becker, executive director of the Association of Local Air Pollution Control Officials, said. "There's no need to sacrifice health and welfare protection to obtain data that industry should have provided in the first place." Two environmental groups, the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense, argued that the agency was letting violators avoid responsibility for two years if they joined the program. "Instead of forcing polluters to clean up their act," the Sierra Club said in a statement, "the Bush administration has given them a 'get out of jail free' card." A senior scientist with Environmental Defense, Joe Rudek, called the program "a sweetheart deal that turned its back on the scientific and environmental communities."
Visions in Need of a Little Realism
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Washington Post, 21 January 2005
"No one is fit to be a master and no one deserves to be a slave," Bush declared. "Democratic reformers facing repression, prison or exile can know: America sees you for who you are, the future leaders of your free country." Exactly right. And what, precisely, do those beautiful words mean for the president's policy toward China or Russia or Saudi Arabia? How consistently will we stand up for embattled democratic reformers? Always? Or only when convenient? And then there is the profoundly uncomfortable question: Do we want Sept. 11 to dominate how we define ourselves indefinitely? The president seems to think so. It's not polite to say at a moment of pomp and ceremony, but defining our politics in terms of that horrific event served the president's interest and was a central reason why he was standing before us yesterday. Many who supported the president in his bold response to the terrorists in Afghanistan cannot escape the suspicion that Sept. 11 will be used again and again as a political rallying cry to justify genuinely radical foreign policy departures that serve neither our nation nor the cause of freedom.
Running Commentary on Bush's Inaugural Speech
David Corn
The Nation, 21 January 2005

Worrisome Hubris
By David Ignatius
Washington Post, 21 January 2005
A Republican who has served in three GOP administrations remarked that the mood in Washington this inauguration week reminded him a bit of the second Nixon administration. There is a smugness and insularity among senior officials -- a feeling that because the president has won reelection, his aides don't have to explain themselves or their policies to the nation. A warning light of that second-term arrogance was Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearing this week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Rice is a smart and often charming person who could make a good secretary of state. But there's a broad consensus in Washington that she has not been a successful national security adviser; she wasn't able to resolve policy disputes in a timely way during her four years at the White House, and she didn't articulate effective strategies for dealing with postwar Iraq, Iran or North Korea. So it was appropriate -- no, absolutely necessary -- that Rice get a tough grilling from the Senate. Where would she push U.S. foreign policy? What lessons has she learned from her past mistakes? What explanation can she offer for policy positions that she took on Iraq that now appear to have been wrong? Rice's response to these questions was a kind of truculent peevishness -- as in, "How dare you?" She was provoked, to be sure, by California Democrat Barbara Boxer, who tried to bait the nominee with questions about Iraq of the "when did you stop beating your wife" variety. But that's part of the confirmation process. Boxer's basic question was an appropriate one, especially for this nominee: Did your loyalty to the president lead you to overlook key facts about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and other issues?

Iraq Shadows Bush's Inauguration
By Ron Fournier
AP in the Washington Post, 20 January 2005
Not a word on Iraq. President Bush's inaugural address contained 2,000 words of passion and promise for his second term, but no direct mention of the war that could sink it. The conflict in Iraq, win or lose, could define his presidency. Bush knows this as well as anyone, which explains his strategic omission.
SEE ALSO:
Dancing the War Away
By BOB HERBERT
21 January 2005
Watching the inaugural ceremonies yesterday reminded me of the scenes near the end of "The Godfather" in which a solemn occasion (a baptism in the movie) is interspersed with a series of spectacularly violent murders. Even as President Bush was taking the oath of office and delivering his Inaugural Address beneath the clear, cold skies of Washington, the news wires were churning out stories about the tragic mayhem in Iraq. There is no end in sight to the carnage, which was unleashed nearly two years ago by President Bush's decision to launch this wholly unnecessary war, one of the worst presidential decisions in American history. Incredibly, with more than 1,360 American troops dead and more than 10,000 wounded, and with scores of thousands of Iraqis dead and wounded, the president never once mentioned the word Iraq in his Inaugural Address. He avoided all but the most general references to the war. Lyndon Johnson used to agonize over the war that unraveled his presidency. Mr. Bush, riding the crest of his re-election wave, seems not to be similarly bothered. ...People traveling in the real world may see Iraq as a place where bombings, kidnappings and assassinations are an integral part of daily life; where police officers are blown to pieces as they line up for their pay; where innocent men, women and children are slain by the thousands for no good reason; where cities like Falluja are leveled in order to save them; where America's overwhelming superiority in firepower has not been enough to win the war; and where the upcoming elections seem very much like a joke since many of the candidates have to keep their identities secret and the locations of many polling places remain undisclosed. People traveling in the real world may see Iraq that way. But in the fantasy-laden Bush realm, Iraq is a place where freedom is on the march. So why not raise a toast to freedom, and dance the night away.

Public Voicing Doubts on Iraq and the Economy, Poll Finds
By ADAM NAGOURNEY and JANET ELDER
NYT, 20 January 2005
On the eve of President Bush's second inauguration, most Americans say they do not expect the economy to improve or American troops to be withdrawn from Iraq by the time Mr. Bush leaves the White House, and many have reservations about his signature plan to overhaul Social Security, according to the latest New York Times/CBS News Poll. Seventy percent, however, said they thought Mr. Bush would succeed in changing the Social Security system. The poll found that 43 percent of respondents expect most forms of abortion to be illegal by the time Mr. Bush leaves the White House, given Mr. Bush's expected appointments to the Supreme Court. The Times/CBS News Poll offered the kind of conflicting portrait of the nation's view of Mr. Bush that was evident throughout last year's presidential campaign. Nearly 60 percent of respondents said they were generally optimistic on the eve of Mr. Bush's swearing-in about the next four years, but clear majorities disapproved of Mr. Bush's management of the economy and the war in Iraq. Nearly two-thirds said a second Bush term would leave the country with a larger deficit, while 47 percent said that a second Bush term would divide Americans. A majority of those surveyed said that they did not expect any improvement in health care, education, or in reducing the cost of prescription drugs for the elderly by January 2009. Just under 80 percent, including a majority of those who said they voted for Mr. Bush in November, said it would not be possible to overhaul Social Security, cut taxes, and finance the war in Iraq without increasing the budget deficit, despite Mr. Bush's promises to the contrary. ...Mr. Bush's job approval rating is at 49 percent as he heads into his second term - significantly lower than the ratings at the start of the second terms of the last two presidents who served eight years, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan. And 56 percent said the country has gone off on the wrong track, about as bad a rating Mr. Bush has received on this measure since entering the White House. ...50 percent said it was a "bad idea" to permit workers to divert part of their payroll taxes into the stock market, as Mr. Bush is expected to propose. That number leaps to 70 percent when the question includes the possibility that future guaranteed benefits would be reduced by as much as one-third. Nearly 60 percent of respondents said they were not likely to put their own Social Security money into the stock market, and a majority said that in pushing for a Social Security overhaul, Mr. Bush was more interested in helping Wall Street than protecting the average American.
The Free Lunch Bunch
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 21 November 2005
Did they believe they would be welcomed as liberators? Administration plans to privatize Social Security have clearly run into unexpected opposition. Even Republicans are balking; Representative Bill Thomas says that the initial Bush plan will soon be a "dead horse." That may be overstating it, but for privatizers the worst is yet to come. If people are rightly skeptical about claims that Social Security faces an imminent crisis, just wait until they start looking closely at the supposed solution. President Bush is like a financial adviser who tells you that at the rate you're going, you won't be able to afford retirement - but that you shouldn't do anything mundane like trying to save more. Instead, you should take out a huge loan, put the money in a mutual fund run by his friends (with management fees to be determined later) and place your faith in capital gains. That, once you cut through all the fine phrases about an "ownership society," is how the Bush privatization plan works. Payroll taxes would be diverted into private accounts, forcing the government to borrow to replace the lost revenue. The government would make up for this borrowing by reducing future benefits; yet workers would supposedly end up better off, in spite of reduced benefits, through the returns on their accounts. The whole scheme ignores the most basic principle of economics: there is no free lunch.

Rice Defends Iraq Mission but Says Military Can't Do It Alone
The secretary of State nominee calls for U.S. diplomacy but signals little overall change.
By Paul Richter
LA Times, 19 January 2005
Secretary of State-designate Condoleezza Rice told Congress on Tuesday that the Iraqi insurgency "cannot be overcome by military force alone," but declined to predict how long U.S. troops must remain in the country while waiting for Iraqis to forge political solutions and assume responsibility for security.
Offering a close look at President Bush's second-term foreign policy plans during her confirmation hearing, Rice strongly defended the administration's course on Iraq, but acknowledged that the United States faced "big tactical challenges" and said that some past decisions on Iraq "might not have been good." ...Her most rancorous exchange was with Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), who said Rice had falsely claimed before the war that Iraq would soon have a nuclear bomb and that she shifted arguments as the administration's needs changed. "Your loyalty to the mission … overwhelmed your respect for the truth," Boxer charged.
Retorted Rice: "I have never, ever lost respect for the truth in the service of anything…. I'm happy to continue the discussion, but I'd like to do it in such a way that it does not impugn my integrity."

None So Blind
The Nation, 31 January issue
Bush starts this second term blind to the consequences of the havoc he has wrought and misleading the very voters who returned him to office. His record is one of failure: aggressive war on Iraq that has led to thousands of American and Iraqi deaths; officially endorsed policies that led to torture in Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo and elsewhere; a botched assault on terror that has isolated America while replenishing the ranks of terrorists; exploding fiscal and trade deficits, with the dollar sinking in value; inequality not seen since the Gilded Age; the worst jobs record since Hoover; and indifference to the threat of catastrophic climate change combined with growing dependence on foreign oil. Meanwhile, Bush's failures have increased Americans' kitchen-table concerns: good jobs leaving, replaced by jobs with lower wages and fewer benefits; a broken healthcare system, with millions unable to afford adequate care; failed promises to invest in schools along with cuts in college grants at a time of soaring costs; a retreat on clean air and water.
Now Bush promises to make things worse. The ideologues who crafted the disaster in Iraq have been rewarded and retained; the realists who dissented have been purged. His first legislative proposal is to curb the rights of citizens to recover for damages caused by the negligence, fraud or malpractice of corporations or doctors. His highest priority is to privatize Social Security, most likely by slashing guaranteed benefits by some 40 percent while borrowing $2 trillion to pay for private accounts that will primarily reward Wall Street. His budget will extend the tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans while cutting investment in education, healthcare and support for essentials from food stamps to home heating for the elderly. He's announced a renewed effort to pack the courts with right-wing judicial reactionaries intent on rolling back the rights and liberties of Americans and returning to the days when labor unions and environmental, wage and safety standards were outlawed as illegal restraints on trade.
Bush won re-election with the most negative campaign in memory, wrapping himself in the flag, assailing his opponent's character and practicing a politics of fear and division. Right-wing appeals mobilized his base while he disdained efforts to woo moderates and independents. He now pledges to govern the same way, using the right to discipline GOP dissenters and scorning bipartisanship, even on matters of war and peace.
The Bush team is sophisticated in propaganda, well versed in the uses of deception to avoid accountability. Bush's policies, however, are damaging this country, and his priorities are not widely shared. Democrats would be well-advised to oppose them, but with the fainthearted among them already wringing their hands and sounding retreat, an aroused progressive movement will be needed to provide the necessary backbone. A majority of Americans are already experiencing buyers' remorse; Bush's razor-thin victory on election day may have witnessed the height of his popularity. The central question of his second term is how soon Americans, recognizing their error, will demand a change in direction.
That Magic Moment
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NYT, 18 January 2005
A charming man courts a woman, telling her that he's a wealthy independent businessman. Just after the wedding, however, she learns that he has been cooking the books, several employees have accused him of sexual harassment and his company is about to file for bankruptcy. She accuses him of deception. "The accountability moment is behind us," he replies.
Cut in Medicare Payments to Hospitals Is Advised
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT, 18 January 2005
An influential federal advisory panel has voted to recommend a cut in Medicare payments promised to hospitals and a freeze in payments to nursing homes and home care agencies in 2006. The recommendations to Congress, approved by the panel last week, give powerful support to Republican lawmakers and Bush administration officials who want to curb soaring Medicare costs, as part of their overall effort to reduce the federal budget deficit.
Will the real 'compassionate conservative' please stand up?
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
 By PAUL O'NEILL
NYT, 16 January 2005
This is what we should do about Social Security: At the same time we acknowledge that it is the most successful domestic program in American history, we should also admit that Social Security, in its present form, is unsustainable. And then we should come up with a plan that is different than what President Bush and most of the pundits are proposing. We should ask ourselves what would be a worthy aspiration for the financial security of retired Americans in the years ahead. My answer is that we should establish a process that will produce a substantial annuity for every American at retirement age. By substantial, I mean at least $1 million. In order to create a real, fully financed annuity of this size, people must begin saving when they enter the work force. The saving needs to be continuous, and it needs to be left intact so that compound interest can work its magic. We can do this. We already have a process in place that requires that we give the government 12.4 percent of our income in the name of Social Security.
SEE ALSO:
A Question of Numbers
The Conservative New Deal
By ROGER LOWENSTEIN
NYT, 16 January 2005
In 1938, the Social Security Act was only three years old, but its future was already very much in doubt. Conservatives claimed it would bankrupt the nation, and independent critics argued that the way it was financed amounted to ''financial hocus-pocus,'' as one editorial in The New York Times put it. President Franklin D. Roosevelt defended the program, said by a cabinet member to be his favorite, with some of his trademark oratory. ''Because it has become increasingly difficult for individuals to build their own security,'' the president told a national radio audience, ''government must now step in and help them lay the foundation stones.''
Social Security did become the cornerstone -- not only the biggest government entitlement plan but also the most universal, the most popular and the most enduring. But the debate over Social Security never ended. Barry Goldwater wanted to repeal it; Milton Friedman wrote in 1962 that it was an unjustifiable incursion on personal liberty; and David Stockman, the budget director who personified Ronald Reagan's efforts to shrink the federal government, tried to take a hatchet to Social Security, which he called a ''monster.''
But in this 70-year struggle, no other conservative has ever come as close to transforming the program as George W. Bush. He is making Social Security reform, including a partial privatization, a centerpiece of his second term. If the most ardent ideologues have their way, such a reform would be a first step toward a wholly new approach to retirement security -- one that would set aside the notion of collective insurance and guaranteed minimums for that of personal investing and responsibility.

States Finally Begin to See Bush Push for Centralization
Red, Blue and Angry All Over
By JAMES DAO
NYT, 16 January 2005
Utah, the reddest of the red states, seems unlikely to protest federal action by a Republican House and president. Yet last fall, as Congress debated a Republican proposal to prohibit states from issuing drivers' licenses to illegal immigrants, Utah was right there, objecting along with liberals and civil libertarians. Utah is one of 10 states that does not require proof of permanent residency to receive a driver's license. The state legislature reasoned that enabling drivers to buy auto insurance was the state's paramount concern - not their immigration status. So when Congress threatened to take that authority away, officials from Utah and other states rose up to block the proposal. ...The National Conference of State Legislatures says the problem has grown so large that it has restarted its Mandate Monitor, which had been discontinued in 1995, to scrutinize the cost of federal regulations on states.  Even as Republicans have begun marking the 10th anniversary of the "Contract With America," which called for ending so-called unfunded mandates, the conference estimates that the federal government has fallen $25 billion short in fiscal year 2005 in paying for the requirements it imposes on state and local governments. The biggest problems: Medicaid and President Bush's signature education program, No Child Left Behind, which established ambitious, and costly, testing regimes and performance standards for public schools. "There's been a big shift toward federal power," said Alan Greenblatt, a writer for Governing magazine, which has covered the issue extensively.
Social Security Agency Is Enlisted to Push Its Own Revision
By ROBERT PEAR
NYT 16 January 2005
Over the objections of many of its own employees, the Social Security Administration is gearing up for a major effort to publicize the financial problems of Social Security and to convince the public that private accounts are needed as part of any solution. The agency's plans are set forth in internal documents, including a "tactical plan" for communications and marketing of the idea that Social Security faces dire financial problems requiring immediate action. Social Security officials say the agency is carrying out its mission to educate the public, including more than 47 million beneficiaries, and to support President Bush's agenda. ...agency employees have complained to Social Security officials that they are being conscripted into a political battle over the future of the program. They question the accuracy of recent statements by the agency, and they say that money from the Social Security trust fund should not be used for such advocacy. "Trust fund dollars should not be used to promote a political agenda," said Dana C. Duggins, a vice president of the Social Security Council of the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents more than 50,000 of the agency's 64,000 workers and has opposed private accounts. Deborah C. Fredericksen of Minneapolis, who has worked for the Social Security Administration for 31 years, said, "Many employees believe that the president and this agency are using scare tactics to promote private accounts."
  International   
United States Subverts Europe's Strategy on Iran
By ELAINE SCIOLINO
NYT, 29 January 2005
"You need to get everybody to read from the same page, the Europeans and the Americans," said Mohamed ElBaradei, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, in an interview in Davos on Friday. "This is not a process that is going to be solved by the Europeans alone," he added. "The United States needs to be engaged. If you continue to say they are going to fail before you give them a chance, it will be a self-fulfilling policy." France's foreign minister, Michel Barnier, echoed those remarks in an interview in Paris on Friday. "I cannot explain American policy to you," he said. "That would be French arrogance and I am not someone who is arrogant. But I think that the Americans must get used to the fact that Europe is going to act. And in this case, without the United States we run the risk of failure." France, Germany and Britain - with European Union support - opened negotiations with Iran last month that could give Iran generous rewards on nuclear energy, trade and economic, political and security cooperation if Iran can provide guarantees that it is not developing a nuclear weapon. The negotiations flow from Iran's voluntary decision in November to temporarily freeze its programs to make enriched uranium, which can be used for producing energy or for making bombs. Instead of embracing the initiative, Mr. Bush began his second term with a sweeping pledge to defend the United States and protect its friends "by force of arms if necessary" and a refusal to rule out military action against Iran.
Flashback to the 60's: A Sinking Sensation of Parallels Between Iraq and Vietnam
By TODD S. PURDUM
NYT, 29 January 2005
Not quite 38 years ago, enmeshed in a drawn-out war whose ultimate outcome was deeply in doubt, Lyndon B. Johnson met on Guam with the fractious generals who were contending for leadership of South Vietnam and told them: "My birthday is in late August. The greatest birthday present you could give me is a national election." George W. Bush's birthday is in early July, but his broad goals for the Iraqi elections on Sunday are much the same as the Johnson administration's in 1967: to confer political legitimacy and credibility on a government that Iraqis themselves will be willing and able to fight to defend, and that American and world public opinion will agree to help nurture. "I think one lesson is that there be a clear objective that everybody understands," Mr. Bush said in an interview with The New York Times this week, reflecting on the relevance of Vietnam today. "A free, democratic Iraq, an ally in the war on terror, with an Iraqi army, all parts of it - Iraqi forces, army, national guard, border guard, police force - able to defend itself. Secondly, that people understand the connection between that goal and our future." But the difficulties of achieving such objectives, then and now, have led a range of military experts, historians and politicians to consider the parallels between Vietnam and Iraq to warn of potential pitfalls ahead. Nearly two years after the American invasion of Iraq, such comparisons are no longer dismissed in mainstream political discourse as facile and flawed, but are instead bubbling to the top.
Arabs Say Iraq Vote Gives Democracy a Bad Name
by Tom Perry
Reuters via Common Dreams, 29 January 2005
President Bush sees Sunday's election in Iraq as a beacon for freedom in the Middle East, but Arab reformers say the poll will set back their cause. Arab human rights activists say the Iraqi election is deeply flawed and will give democracy a bad name. They say violence and the prospect of a Sunni Arab boycott will undermine the poll. Many Arabs, already suspicious of U.S. intentions in Iraq, are also dismissing the vote's credibility because of the presence of the 150,000 U.S. troops there. "The influence of the elections for us as democrats is disastrous," Syrian human rights activist Haytham Manna told Reuters from Paris. "When you marginalize wide sections of society from the political process ... this is not democracy." ..."The elections depict democracy as if it is connected to the idea of submission to the American occupier," said Abdel Halim Qandil, who is campaigning against an extension of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's 23-year-old rule. "The idea of democracy will lose its reputation in the Arab world entirely," Qandil said, comparing the Iraqi election with 20th-century polls held in Egypt under British occupation. "Democratic charades of this type were going on then," he said. Some Arab dissidents also say violence in Iraq has given Arab governments an excuse to deflect pressure from the Bush administration for democratic reform across the Middle East.
Hoon and Rumsfeld Agree Iraq Exit Strategy
Patrick Wintour and Ewen MacAskill
The Guardian, 28 January 2005
The US and Britain have privately agreed an exit strategy from Iraq based on doubling the number of local police trainees and setting up Iraqi units that would act as a halfway house between the police and the army. The agreement was reached on Monday between the US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, and his British counterpart, Geoff Hoon. It was based on recommendations from retired US general Gary Luck, sent to Iraq by the Pentagon last month to look at the failings of Iraq's security force. The more aggressive police force is designed gradually to replace the 150,000 coalition troops and will form the centrepiece of plans for Britain and the US to quit Iraq. Although no deadline has been set for withdrawal - partly, British sources say, because it may encourage the insurgents - Britain has made a phased pull-out its top priority. "Everything the defence secretary is working towards now is an exit strategy, but without a public timetable," said a British military source.
AP: Gitmo Soldier Details Sexual Tactics
By PAISLEY DODDS
AP via Yahoo!News from Agonist, 27 January 2005
Female interrogators tried to break Muslim detainees at the U.S. prison camp in Guantanamo Bay by sexual touching, wearing a miniskirt and thong underwear and in one case smearing a Saudi man's face with fake menstrual blood, according to an insider's written account.
A draft manuscript obtained by The Associated Press is classified as secret pending a Pentagon (news - web sites) review for a planned book that details ways the U.S. military used women as part of tougher physical and psychological interrogation tactics to get terror suspects to talk. It's the most revealing account so far of interrogations at the secretive detention camp, where officials say they have halted some controversial techniques. "I have really struggled with this because the detainees, their families and much of the world will think this is a religious war based on some of the techniques used, even though it is not the case," the author, former Army Sgt. Erik R. Saar, 29, told AP. Saar didn't provide the manuscript or approach AP, but confirmed the authenticity of nine draft pages AP obtained. He requested his hometown remain private so he wouldn't be harassed. Saar, who is neither Muslim nor of Arab descent, worked as an Arabic translator at the U.S. camp in eastern Cuba from December 2002 to June 2003. At the time, it was under the command of Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller, who had a mandate to get better intelligence from prisoners, including alleged al-Qaida members caught in Afghanistan
This Election Is A Sham
Salim Lone
International Herald Tribune via TomPaine.com, 28 January 2005
Very early in the occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration recognized that a democratic Iraq, even a stridently anti-Saddam one, would not countenance the strategic U.S. goals the war was fought for: controlling the second-largest oil reserves in an energy-thirsty world, and establishing military bases required for undertaking the political transformation of the Middle East to serve American interests. A long-term occupation to secure these ambitious goals was no less tenable. So even as the Americans proclaimed their mission as one designed to introduce democracy and human rights in Iraq, they fought against demands for early elections even from putative allies like the Shiite Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. They also maneuvered to put into place a self-governance and electoral plan that, through carefully circumscribed United Nations involvement, they thought would ensure that the hand-picked Iraqi leadership would enjoy some legitimacy, with the elections scheduled for Sunday providing an added boost of Shiite support. But as this blood-stained election shows, the complete breakdown of this plan has been one of the most colossal U.S. policy failures of the last half-century. Indeed, this is not an election that any democratic nation, or indeed any independent international electoral organization, would recognize as legitimate.
Iraqis' Big Issue: US exit plan US troops are vital to security for Sunday's vote, but pressure is growing for them to leave.
By Scott Peterson and Dan Murphy
The Christian Science Monitor, 28 January 2005
...the one thing every Iraqi agrees upon is that occupation should end soon. Though the United States is certain to play a major military role here for the near future, Iraqi politicians face intensifying pressure to speak out against its presence.
Iraq Insurgents Kill 12 As Election Nears
AP via NYT, 28 January 2005
Insurgents stepped up attacks Thursday against polling centers across Iraq, killing at least a dozen people, including a U.S. Marine, in the rebel campaign to frighten Iraqis away from participating in this weekend's election. As part of an intensifying campaign of intimidation, an al-Qaida affiliate led by Jordanian terror mastermind Abu Musab al-Zarqawi posted a videotape on the Internet showing the murder of a candidate from the party of interim Prime Minister Ayad Allawi. The tape included a warning to Allawi personally: ``You traitor, wait for the angel of death.'' To protect voters on Sunday, hundreds of American soldiers began moving out of their massive garrison on the western edge of Baghdad to take up positions at smaller bases throughout the city to respond more quickly to any election day attacks.
Another excellent  summary of the Israeli influence and key players
Losing Feith
by Jim Lobe
Antiwar.com, 28 January 2005
The departure by mid-2005 of the number-three man at the Defense Department, announced by the Pentagon Wednesday, marks the latest hint that President George W. Bush is moving foreign policy in a more centrist direction. Combined with several other personnel shifts, as well as a concerted effort to reassure the public and U.S. allies abroad that last week's messianic inaugural address did not portend any dramatic new foreign policy departures, the resignation of Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith suggests that the administration is deliberately shedding its sharper and more radical edges. The fact that Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John Bolton, who had hoped to be promoted to deputy secretary of state under Condoleezza Rice, has still not been assigned a new job has contributed to that impression. Like Feith, Bolton, the administration's most outspoken exponent of unilateralism, has generally been regarded as an extremist on key issues, such as Iraq, the International Criminal Court (ICC), and Iran and other nuclear proliferation issues, that have wreaked havoc on U.S. ties with its European allies.
AUDIO/VIDEO LINK
Code Names: A Look Behind Secret U.S. Military Plans in the Middle East, Africa and at Home
 DemocracyNow!, 27 January 2005
We speak with military analyst, William Arkin, author of the new book Code Names: Deciphering U.S. Military Plans, Programs, and Operations in the 9/11 World. It identifies 3,000 once-secret code names and details the plans and missions they stand for. Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News describes the book as "perhaps the most concentrated act of defiance of official secrecy policies since Howard Morland wrote about the H Bomb Secret in the Progressive in 1979." [includes rush transcript]
Journalists' Objectivity Needs Balance of Truth
Chris Hedges
Philadelphia Inquirer via Antiwar.com, 23 January 2005
Chris Hedges was a foreign correspondent for nearly two decades and is author of "War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning" Balance and objectivity, without a strong commitment to the truth, can turn journalism into farce. It was impossible to witness the army massacres in El Salvador or the murder of children by Bosnian Serb snipers in Sarajevo without being revolted. I hated these crimes. I took risks, along with many of my colleagues, to expose and explain them. And I wanted, through my reporting, to get the world to wake up and put an end to the wholesale murder of innocents. This commitment, however, was effective only when we were rigorous about telling the truth. It is this moral core, this belief that we can contribute to an open society and make the world a better place, that keeps me and other reporters focused on truth as well as balance and objectivity.
Missed Opportunities in Iraq
By Madeleine K. Albright
USA TODAY, 26 January 2005
One yearns to believe Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when he says that "just having elections in Iraq is an enormous success and a victory." The sad truth is that it is not. In the democratic symphony, elections are but a single note. An election that produces more of the same, or possibly even worse, will mean neither success nor victory. It has long been obvious that the Bush administration lacks a viable plan for success in Iraq. The hardest political job — drafting a constitution acceptable to all factions — has not even begun. The "coalition," never robust, is shrinking. We have no military strategy that makes sense; civilian leaders have placed U.S. armed forces in an almost impossible position. America is by far the world's most powerful country, and yet the fate of its Iraq policy depends almost entirely on the goodwill of Iraq's most influential religious leader, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a Shiite Muslim cleric with a heart condition. If the elections do not mark a decisive change, the administration may conclude that it has no more cards to play. In which case, it could well declare "mission accomplished" nonetheless and begin laying the groundwork for folding its hand. ...The administration will not simply cut and run. A decent interval will be observed. The White House will need time to recondition public expectations. If it is Machiavellian enough, it will find a way to blame anti-war critics for emboldening the enemy such that phased withdrawal became the only option. The administration will blame allies for not doing more, the United Nations for inadequate election planning, Iran and Syria for fueling the violence and Iraqi security forces for refusing to kill other Iraqis. It will blame everyone except itself. And it will leave behind a deadly, unpredictable, combustible mess.
On the Job Training Opportunity
Now, the fact is the administration's invasion of Iraq has produced a band of international terrorists so skilled, illusive and dangerous that the world with Saddam Hussein in power was indeed a safer place.
U.N. Report Calls for Help to Ease U.S. Budget and Trade Deficits
By ELIZABETH BECKER
NYT, 26 January 2005
The United Nations on Tuesday urged all the major industrial countries, especially Japan and the nations of Europe, to help the United States reduce its deficits by spurring their own economies to grow faster. In a report, "World Economic Situation and Prospects 2005," the United Nations said that the budget and trade deficits of the United States were putting the global economy off balance. It echoed warnings by the International Monetary Fund and other financial institutions in saying the United States cannot continue to carry its huge debts. "What we really need is a major advancement in cooperation among the advanced economies to help the U.S. get out of this problem," said José Antonio Ocampo, the under secretary general for economic and social affairs at the United Nations, in an interview. The United States deficit is a global problem in part because the country has the fastest-growing economy among industrial nations and, together with China, is largely responsible for helping to pull the world economy out of the doldrums. But whereas China has been an economic engine with its huge growth in manufacturing and exports, the United States has pushed growth by consuming far more goods than it exports.   ...The United States has amassed a debt without precedent. The International Monetary Fund calculates that the United States' current-account deficit stands at $631 billion, or 5.4 percent of gross domestic product. Japan and China both have trade surpluses, as do most of the wealthiest European nations. The exceptions are Britain, which has a current-account deficit equivalent to 2 percent of its G.D.P., and Italy, with a deficit of 1.1 percent of G.D.P. "The message of our report is that the industrialized countries all have their own problems that will hurt growth," Mr. Ocampo said. "The U.S. has its deficits while Europe and Japan are slow in recovering. But the most challenging is the U.S. twin deficits."
2020 Vision
A CIA report predicts that American global dominance could end in 15 years.
By Fred Kaplan
Slate, 26 January 2005
Who will be the first politician brave enough to declare publicly that the United States is a declining power and that America's leaders must urgently discuss what to do about it? This prognosis of decline comes not (or not only) from leftist scribes rooting for imperialism's downfall, but from the National Intelligence Council—the "center of strategic thinking" inside the U.S. intelligence community. The NIC's conclusions are starkly presented in a new 119-page document, "Mapping the Global Future: Report of the National Intelligence Council's 2020 Project." It is unclassified and available on the CIA's Web site.
Stay Indoors and Don't Tell Anyone Your Name, Iraq Candidates Told
By Jack Fairweather
The Telegraph (UK), 25 January 2005
In a darkened hall, candidates for Iraq's main Shia party sit listening to a turbaned cleric speaking into a microphone. They are being told how to campaign for the election without getting killed. The instructions are simple - avoid public places and do not reveal your identity, the cleric advised. Most candidates should stay at home as much as possible, he added.
Reining in Cheney
by Ray McGovern
Common Dreams, 26 January 2005
Quick! Anyone! Who can put the brakes on Vice President Dick Cheney before we have another war on our hands? Current and former intelligence analysts are reacting with wonderment and apprehension to his remarks last week on the nuclear program of Iran and his resuscitated spinning on why attacking Iraq was the prudent thing to do. There he goes again, they say—trifling with the truth on Iraq and now taking off after Iran. Does he really have the temerity to reach into the same bag of tricks used to convince most Americans that Iraq was an immediate nuclear threat? Will his distinctive mix of truculence and contempt for the truth succeed in rationalizing attacks on Iran on grounds that US intelligence may have underestimated the progress in Iraq’s nuclear weapons program 15 years ago? At this point the focus is no longer on the bogus weapons of mass destruction (WMD) rationale used to promote the attack on Iraq, intelligence analysts say. It’s the claims the vice president is now making regarding Iran’s nuclear capability...and, given the deliberate distortions on Iraq, whether anyone should believe him.
Kucinich: Iraq Elections Will Be A Farce;
Closest International Election Monitors Will Get Will Be Amman, Jordan
In Letter To Secretary of State Rice and Ambassador Negroponte; Kucinich Cites Lack Of International Monitors
Common Dreams, 26 January 2005
Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH) today said that Iraqi elections, to be held on Sunday, will be a farce. In a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and John Negroponte, the United States Ambassador to Iraq, Kucinich cites a total absence of international election monitors in Iraq for Sunday's elections. The closest international monitors will get to Iraq on Sunday will be Amman, Jordan.
In the letter, sent today, Kucinich states, "It is clear, in just five days before the Iraqi elections are to be held, that it will be impossible to conclude anything about the extent to which corruption, voter intimidation or outright fraud will mar the results. The exercise will regrettably be a farce. The results will have no recognized legitimacy whatsoever, and surely do not merit association with the United States' notions of democracy.

31 Die in Copter Crash; Another Incident Leaves 4 Marines Dead
By JOHN F. BURNS
and TERENCE NEILAN
NYT, 26 January 2005
Thirty-one marines died today when a transport helicopter crashed in the desert in western Iraq, Gen. George Casey Jr. said here today. The general, the top American field commander in Iraq, declined to say at a news conference whether mechanical failure was the cause. Other officials said bad weather might have been a contributing factor. It was also possible that the craft hit a power line, what the military calls a wire strike. The incident was believed to be the single worst loss of life involving a helicopter crash in the 22 months of the war. Military officials said today's crash, over the so-called Black Desert bordering Jordan and Syria in Anbar Province, involved a CH-53 Sea Stallion helicopter transporting marines, although there was no immediate word on how many were aboard. Since a spate of shootings in 2003, helicopters have followed revised flight procedures. Helicopters now routinely fly at low altitudes and maintain a zigzag flight pattern.
 
Think About It
The administration intends US troops to remain in Iraq until Iraqis are capable of providing for their own security. It has taken two years for the US to train 120,000 Iraqis for that job. It's generally recognized that 50 to 75% of those troops fade away under fire and are not willing to risk their lives in battles that the US sees as necessary. Isn't it obvious that US political and military influence in Iraq is diminishing and not increasing? Bush's strategy is failing and must change. The question that remains is "When will it be an appropriate time to apply the old business concept of 'cutting your losses'?"

Kucinich: No More Funds For Failed Iraq Policy
Common Dreams, 25 January 2005
Congressman Dennis J. Kucinich (D-OH), a leader in the House of Representatives against the war in Iraq, released the following statement in response to news reports that the Administration will request an additional $80 billion dollars for the war in Iraq: "Congress should reject the Administration's request for an additional $80 billion in funds for the war in Iraq. The Administration's entire case for the war has now been debunked, Iraq is on the verge of a civil war, and the Administration still refuses to admit any mistakes. "American troops and American taxpayers are footing the bill for a war that was never needed, and a war that is counterproductive to the security interests of our nation. No weapons of mass destruction have been found in Iraq and the 9-11 Commission has determined that Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with the September 11th attacks or the Al Qaeda terrorist network. "The war in Iraq and the subsequent occupation has been a failure. Iraq is on the verge of a civil war, and the attacks on US soldiers and innocent Iraqi citizens by insurgents are becoming more brazen and deadly by the day. Iraq has now become a breeding ground for terrorism.

Fake democracy generates little enthusiasm
Iraqis Abroad Seem Reluctant to Vote, Too, Sign-Up Shows
By HASSAN M. FATTAH
NYT, 26 January 2005
After a two-day extension, registration of Iraqi voters living abroad drew to a close Tuesday but fell well below expectations, with about a quarter of the number predicted by organizers signing up for Sunday's election. By Tuesday morning, some 255,000 Iraqis living overseas had registered in 14 nations. Organizers had expected that roughly one million voters would sign up. The low turnout added to the troubles of a process that was burdened throughout by security concerns, confusion and some controversy.
Irrevocable outcome of inaction
Antarctica, Warming, Looks Ever More Vulnerable
By LARRY ROHTER
NYT, 26 January 2005
As a result, huge glaciers in this and other remote areas of Antarctica are thinning and ice shelves the size of American states are either disintegrating or retreating - all possible indications of global warming. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey reported in December that in some parts of the Antarctic Peninsula hundreds of miles from here, large growths of grass are appearing in places that until recently were hidden under a frozen cloak."The evidence is piling up; everything fits," Dr. Robert Thomas, a glaciologist from NASA who is the lead author of a recent paper on accelerating sea-level rise, said as the Chilean Navy plane flew over the sea ice here on an unusually clear day late in November. "Around the Amundsen Sea, we have surveyed a half dozen glaciers. All are thinning, in some cases quite rapidly, and in each case, the ice shelf is also thinning." The relationship between glaciers (essentially frozen rivers) and ice shelves (thick plates of ice protruding from the land and floating on the ocean) is complicated and not fully understood. But scientists like to compare the spot where the "tongue" of a glacier flows to sea in the form of an ice shelf to a cork in a bottle. When the ice shelf breaks up, this can allow the inland ice to accelerate its march to the sea. "By themselves, the tongue of the glacier or the cork in the bottle do not represent that much," said Dr. Claudio Teitelboim, the director of the Center for Scientific Studies, a private Chilean institution that is the partner of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in surveying the ice fields of Antarctica and Patagonia. "But once the cork is dislodged, the contents of the bottle flow out, and that can generate tremendous instability." Glaciologists also know that by itself, free-floating sea ice does not raise the level of the sea, just as an ice cube in a glass of water does not cause an overflow as it melts. But glaciers are different because they rest on land, and if that vast volume of ice slides into the sea at a high rate, this adds mass to the ocean, which in turn can raise the global sea level.

Hopes High, Hard Facts
By Fareed Zakaria
Newsweek, 24 January 2005
...Bush has also pushed higher on the agenda the question of American hypocrisy. I often argue with an Indian businessman friend of mine that America is unfairly singled out for scrutiny abroad. “Why didn’t anyone criticize the French or Chinese for their meager response to the tsunami?” I asked him recently. His response was simple. “America positions itself as the moral arbiter of the world, it pronounces on the virtues of all other regimes, it tells the rest of the world whether they are good or evil,” he said. “No one else does that. America singles itself out. And so the gap between what it says and what it does is blindingly obvious—and for most of us, extremely annoying.” That gap just grew a lot bigger.
Iraq: Torture Continues at Hands of New Government
Police Systematically Abusing Detainees
Human Rights Watch Report, 25 January 2005
Iraqi security forces are committing systematic torture and other abuses against people in detention, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today. The 94-page report, The New Iraq? Torture and Ill-treatment of Detainees in Iraqi Custody, documents how unlawful arrest, long-term incommunicado detention, torture and other ill-treatment of detainees (including children) by Iraqi authorities have become routine and commonplace. Human Rights Watch conducted interviews in Iraq with 90 detainees, 72 of whom alleged having been tortured or ill-treated, particularly under interrogation.
SEE ALSO:
ALCU Collection of Army Documents
Army Plans To Keep Iraq Troop Level Through '06
Year-Long Active-Duty Stints Likely to Continue
By Bradley Graham
Washington Post, 25 January 2005
The U.S. Army expects to keep its troop strength in Iraq at the current level of about 120,000 for at least two more years, according to the Army's top operations officer.
Climate Change: Countdown to Global Catastrophe
Report warns point of no return may be reached in 10 years, leading to droughts, agricultural failure and water shortages
by Michael McCarthy
Common Dreams, 24 January 2005
The global warming danger threshold for the world is clearly marked for the first time in an international report to be published tomorrow - and the bad news is, the world has nearly reached it already. The countdown to climate-change catastrophe is spelt out by a task force of senior politicians, business leaders and academics from around the world - and it is remarkably brief. In as little as 10 years, or even less, their report indicates, the point of no return with global warming may have been reached. And it breaks new ground by putting a figure - for the first time in such a high-level document - on the danger point of global warming, that is, the temperature rise beyond which the world would be irretrievably committed to disastrous changes. These could include widespread agricultural failure, water shortages and major droughts, increased disease, sea-level rise and the death of forests - with the added possibility of abrupt catastrophic events such as "runaway" global warming, the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or the switching-off of the Gulf Stream. The report says this point will be two degrees centigrade above the average world temperature prevailing in 1750 before the industrial revolution, when human activities - mainly the production of waste gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), which retain the sun's heat in the atmosphere - first started to affect the climate. But it points out that global average temperature has already risen by 0.8 degrees since then, with more rises already in the pipeline - so the world has little more than a single degree of temperature latitude before the crucial point is reached.
SEE ALSO:
Meeting the Climate Challenge (Institute for Public Policy Research)
23 at Guantanamo Attempted Suicide in 2003
By PAISLEY DODDS
AP via The Guardian, 25 January 2005
Twenty-three terror suspects tried to hang or strangle themselves at the U.S. military base in Guantanamo Bay during a mass protest in 2003, the military confirmed Monday. The incidents came during the same year the camp suffered a rash of suicide attempts after Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller took command of the prison with a mandate to get more information from prisoners accused of links to al-Qaida or the ousted Afghan Taliban regime that sheltered it.

Blast Rocks Central Baghdad
AP via Washington Post, 24 January 2005
A large explosion near the Iraqi prime minister's party headquarters on Monday has injured at least 10 people, police said. There was no immediate word on the exact number of casualties. The blast shook the city and sent a column of black smoke rising above the skyline.

Untroubled by questions of 'democracy' or 'sovereignty'
U.S. Attempts To Build Trust, Leaders in Iraq
By Steve Fainaru
Washington Post, 23 January 2005
In Washington, U.S. officials also said that after the elections they would incorporate more troops and officers from Saddam Hussein's army into the Iraqi military and move Iraqis to the front lines to battle insurgents.
America and Its War with the Invisible Kingdom of Satan
by Norman Mailer
The Sunday Times (UK), 23 January 2005
The US wants world domination, but its people are heedless pleasure seekers. What’s needed is a morality tale to scare them in the shopping malls. 9/11 came just in time.
SEE ALSO:
Bibles for Iraq
World Help, January 2005
Time is of the essence and I have great news!... As I'm sure you know from reading the news, elections in Iraq are coming up at the end of January. Having a true election in Iraq is an extraordinary achievement. But the danger is that we have no idea what kind of government will emerge from this election. It could easily be a government that might decide to close Iraq to the Gospel and outlaw our "Bibles for Iraq" distribution project. The bottom line is: we desperately need to provide more Arabic Bibles and we must get them into Iraq quickly, before the elections at the end of January. The situation in Iraq is becoming even more desperate and dangerous. The terrorists are determined to make sure the elections in January don't happen. And they have focused their attention on all the new Christian churches that are springing up across Iraq and on the distribution of Bibles - which they see as an even greater threat to their vision for Iraq than the U.S. Military. These terrorist know that the U.S. Military's presence in Iraq is temporary, but that if the Gospel takes root, and if more churches are planted, Christ's presence in Iraq will be permanent and that nation will be truly transformed. These terrorists know they can outlast the U.S. Military. But they can't outlast the Gospel! And they can't outlast the Spirit of Jesus Christ that's now starting to sweep across Iraq!
Secret Unit Expands Rumsfeld's Domain
New Espionage Branch Delving Into CIA Territory
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post, 23 January 2005
The Pentagon, expanding into the CIA's historic bailiwick, has created a new espionage arm and is reinterpreting U.S. law to give Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld broad authority over clandestine operations abroad, according to interviews with participants and documents obtained by The Washington Post. The previously undisclosed organization, called the Strategic Support Branch, arose from Rumsfeld's written order to end his "near total dependence on CIA" for what is known as human intelligence. Designed to operate without detection and under the defense secretary's direct control, the Strategic Support Branch deploys small teams of case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists alongside newly empowered special operations forces. Military and civilian participants said in interviews that the new unit has been operating in secret for two years -- in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places they declined to name. According to an early planning memorandum to Rumsfeld from Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the focus of the intelligence initiative is on "emerging target countries such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia." Myers and his staff declined to be interviewed.
The Strategic Support Branch was created to provide Rumsfeld with independent tools for the "full spectrum of humint operations," according to an internal account of its origin and mission. Human intelligence operations, a term used in counterpoint to technical means such as satellite photography, range from interrogation of prisoners and scouting of targets in wartime to the peacetime recruitment of foreign spies. A recent Pentagon memo states that recruited agents may include "notorious figures" whose links to the U.S. government would be embarrassing if disclosed.  ...Pentagon officials emphasized their intention to remain accountable to Congress, but they also asserted that defense intelligence missions are subject to fewer legal constraints than Rumsfeld's predecessors believed. That assertion involves new interpretations of Title 10 of the U.S. Code, which governs the armed services, and Title 50, which governs, among other things, foreign intelligence. Under Title 10, for example, the Defense Department must report to Congress all "deployment orders," or formal instructions from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to position U.S. forces for combat. But guidelines issued this month by Undersecretary for Intelligence Stephen A. Cambone state that special operations forces may "conduct clandestine HUMINT operations . . . before publication" of a deployment order, rendering notification unnecessary. Pentagon lawyers also define the "war on terror" as ongoing, indefinite and global in scope. That analysis effectively discards the limitation of the defense secretary's war powers to times and places of imminent combat. Under Title 50, all departments of the executive branch are obliged to keep Congress "fully and currently informed of all intelligence activities." The law exempts "traditional . . . military activities" and their "routine support." Advisers said Rumsfeld, after requesting a fresh legal review by the Pentagon's general counsel, interprets "traditional" and "routine" more expansively than his predecessors. "Operations the CIA runs have one set of restrictions and oversight, and the military has another," said a Republican member of Congress with a substantial role in national security oversight, declining to speak publicly against political allies. "It sounds like there's an angle here of, 'Let's get around having any oversight by having the military do something that normally the [CIA] does, and not tell anybody.' That immediately raises all kinds of red flags for me. Why aren't they telling us?"
SEE ALSO:
Oh, my God!
 Some Question Background of Unit's Leader
Inexperienced Personnel Cited As a Risk to Espionage Work
By Barton Gellman
Washington Post, 23 January 2005
Col. George Waldroup, an Army reserve officer who commands the Defense Intelligence Agency's Strategic Support Branch, is described by associates as a colorful Texan who refers to himself in the third person, as "GW." Among skeptics of the Pentagon's intelligence initiatives, including members of two elite special operations units interviewed for this article, Waldroup is controversial. His ascent to a top espionage post from a civilian career at the Immigration and Naturalization Service is a cautionary tale, according to them, about the risks of rapid expansion in the staffing and mission of clandestine units.
Sadr Group Signals Rejection Of Election
Shiite Cleric Eyes Role Outside System
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post, 24 January 2005
Dying for Sycophants: Not One Bad News Bearer in Bush's Inner Circle
By Paul Craig Roberts
Propaganda Matrix, 21 January 2004
In her confirmation hearing before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, "Condi" Rice personified the Bush administration's delusion-based "war against terror." Whenever a senator's question penetrated to the harsh reality, Condi waffled and evaded, choosing to protect at the expense of her reputation the neocon delusion that invading Iraq was the "right thing to do." Exasperated, Senator Barbara Boxer objected to Condi's "continuing assault on reality." Condi Rice's outstanding qualification for Secretary of State in the Bush administration is that she is the complete sycophant. She fits right in. Can you name anyone in the Bush administration who is not a sycophant? Consider: On January 13 the Financial Times reported that many in the Bush administration are alive to the "depth of the crisis" in Iraq, "but, they say, this is not a view accepted by President George W. Bush." Another source told the Financial Times that "reality based" assessments of the Iraq crisis "stop well short of the president." Citing sources, the Financial Times reports that when queried by President Bush for his views on the progress of the war, Secretary of State Colin Powell replied, "We're losing." Bush responded to his candid Secretary of State not by asking Powell to tell him about it but by asking Powell to leave. The way President Bush sees it, bearers of bad news are "against America." This means that anyone who is not a sycophant is not "with us" but "against us." How can there be any bad news when America is Good, America is Powerful, and the other guys are bad and not powerful? If Bush were aware that his army has failed to "secure Iraq," he might wonder at the neocon-likudnik plans to attack Iran. Bush might even stop being Richard Perle's puppet. Or Ariel Sharon's poodle.
SEE ALSO:
Rice Promises More of the Same (Time Online Edition)

Tom discovers the outcome of a war he advocated
Divided We Stand
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NYT, 23 January 2005
I spent Friday morning interviewing two 18-year-old French Muslim girls in the Paris immigrant district of St.-Ouen. (It is about a mile from the school where in March 2003 a French Muslim girl, who had refused the veil and rebuffed the advances of a Muslim boy, was thrown into a garbage can by three Muslim teenagers, who then tossed lighted cigarette butts into the can and closed the lid.) Both girls I interviewed wore veils and one also wore a full Afghan-like head-to-toe covering; one was of Egyptian parents, the other of Tunisian parents, but both were born and raised in France. What did I learn from them? That they got all their news from Al Jazeera TV, because they did not believe French TV, that the person they admired most in the world was Osama bin Laden, because he was defending Islam, that suicide "martyrdom" was justified because there was no greater glory than dying in defense of Islam, that they saw themselves as Muslims first and French citizens last, and that all their friends felt pretty much the same.
We were not in Kabul. We were standing outside their French public high school - a short ride from the Eiffel Tower.
'Democracy on the march'
Mystery in Iraq as $300 Million is Taken Abroad
By DEXTER FILKINS
NYT, 22 January 2005
Earlier this month, according to Iraqi officials, $300 million in American bills was taken out of Iraq's Central Bank, put into boxes and quietly put on a charter jet bound for Lebanon. The money was to be used to buy tanks and other weapons from international arms dealers, the officials say, as part of an accelerated effort to assemble an armored division for the fledgling Iraqi Army. But exactly where the money went, and to whom, and for precisely what, remains a mystery, at least to Iraqis who say they have been trying to find out. ...The $300 million flight has been the talk of Iraq's political class, and fueled the impression among many Iraqis and Western officials that the interim Iraqi government, set up after the American occupation formally ended in June, is awash in corruption. It is not clear whether the money came from Iraqi or American sources, or both. "I am sorry to say that the corruption here is worse now than in the Saddam Hussein era," said Mowaffak al-Rubaie, the Iraqi national security adviser, who said he had not been informed of the details of the flight or the arms deal.

At Least 15 Killed, 40 Hurt By Car Bomb
By Anthony Shadid
Washington Post, 21 January 2005
A car bomb exploded outside a Shiite Muslim mosque killing 15 people and wounding 40 in Baghdad on Friday as worshipers celebrated one of the year's most important Muslim holidays.

Wolfowitz Says Reducing US Casualties in Iraq More Important
AFP in Yahoo! News, 20 January 2005
The number two Pentagon official said reducing American casualties in Iraq was more important than bringing US troops back home -- and pointed to the rising Iraqi death toll as evidence this strategy was working.
If you like Iraq, you're going to love Iran
Next Stop, Tehran?
by Chris Toensing
The Progressive, 5 February issue
"Real men want to go to Tehran." So went the mordant barroom quip--variously attributed to Undersecretary of State John Bolton and other neoconservative hawks--during the --long buildup to the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Saddam Hussein's ruling clique in Baghdad, it was said, would be only the first in a series of rogue regimes to get crushed under the Bush Administration's heel. ...As Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith told The Jerusalem Post on December 12, "I don't think that anybody should be ruling in or ruling out anything while we are conducting diplomacy." Pletka, co-founder of the Coalition for Democracy in Iran, concluded her comments on Iran at a recent Brookings briefing as follows: "So we have to recognize that while there are plenty of stops along the way, in fact, [military action] is the end of the road."
SEE ALSO:
Cheney Says Iran Tops U.S. List, Warns Israel
Reuters, 20 January 2005
Vice President Dick Cheney said on Thursday that Iran was at the top of the administration's list of world trouble spots and expressed concern that Israel "might well decide to act first" to eliminate any nuclear threat from Tehran.
"You look around the world at potential trouble spots, Iran is right at the top of the list," Cheney said in an interview aired on MSNBC. "Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel, the Israelis might well decide to act first and let the rest of the world worry about cleaning up the diplomatic mess afterwards," he said.

Multiple Car Bombs Are Detonated Across Baghdad
AP via NYT, 19 January 2005
A wave of car bombings shook the Iraqi capital Wednesday, killing at least nine people as rebels stepped up their offensive to block the Jan. 30 national election. Other attacks were reported north and south of the capital, but the U.N. election chief said only a sustained onslaught could stop the ballot.
U.S. military officials put the death toll from the day's violence at 26, based on initial field reports. Iraqi authorities said 10 people were killed -- one in a drive-by shooting on a political party office and the other nine in the bombings. The discrepancy could not be immediately resolved.
The violence began about 7 a.m., when a bomb packed into a truck exploded outside the Australian Embassy in Baghdad, killing two people. Two Australian soldiers were injured.
A half hour later, another car bomb killed six at a police station located next to a hospital in eastern Baghdad.
...Carlos Valenzuela, the chief U.N. election adviser in Iraq, said the intimidation of electoral workers by guerrillas seeking to derail this month's balloting is ``high and very serious.''
But Valenzuela told reporters Tuesday that only a sustained onslaught by insurgents or the mass resignation of electoral workers will prevent this month's national elections from going ahead.
U.S. troops have stepped up raids across the country, arresting scores of suspected insurgents in hopes of aborting plans to disrupt the ballot.
On Wednesday, the U.S. military acknowledged that its soldiers opened fire on a car as it approached their checkpoint, killing two civilians in the vehicle's front seat. Six children riding in the backseat were unhurt.
[etc., etc., etc.]
Support for War in Iraq Hits New Low
Most no longer back the administration's basis for invading, but a majority say U.S. troops should stay longer to assist with stabilization.
By Doyle McManus
LA Times, 19 January 2005
Support for the war in Iraq has continued to erode, but most Americans still are inclined to give the Bush administration some time to try to stabilize the country before it withdraws U.S. troops, the Los Angeles Times Poll has found.
The poll, conducted Saturday through Monday, found that the percentage of Americans who believed the situation in Iraq was "worth going to war over" had sunk to a new low of 39%. When the same question was asked in a similar poll in October, 44% said it had been worth going to war.
But when asked whether the United States should begin withdrawing troops after Iraq's election Jan. 30, 52% said the administration should wait to see what the new Iraqi government wanted. More than a third, 37%, said the United States should begin drawing down at least some of its troop strength.
Americans are almost evenly divided over how long U.S. forces should stay in Iraq, the poll found: 47% said they would like to see most of the troops out within a year, while 49% say they could support a longer deployment — including 37% who say the troops should remain "as long as it takes" to secure and stabilize the country.
The results suggest that while Americans have grown more pessimistic about the chances for success in Iraq, most are willing to give President Bush some time to try to turn the operation into a success.
"We are seeing lower support for the war, but I would have expected it to be even lower … given that the main rationale for the war — the weapons of mass destruction — turned out not to be there," said John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University who is an authority on wartime public opinion.
Mueller noted that support for the war had been falling gradually since the United States invaded Iraq in March 2003, but that the erosion had not produced a majority in favor of early troop withdrawals.
"Support for this war is now lower than support for the Vietnam War was at the Tet offensive," Mueller said, citing the 1968 battles that were a turning point in U.S. public opinion then. "But in Vietnam [after Tet], the war continued for several years, and many people continued to support it through enormous casualties."
Most Americans Frown on Bush's Iraq policy
AFP, 18 January 2005
Despite President George W. Bush's belief that by reelecting him Americans expressed support for the war on Iraq, two opinion polls published Tuesday showed the opposite: the majority think the war was a mistake and disapprove of the way he is handling things in Iraq. Shortly before Bush's inauguration for his second term in office, and after he said in an interview that the 2004 election result proved that electorate approved of his handling of the war, a Washington Post/ABC News poll showed that 55 percent of Americans felt the Iraq war was not worth fighting, against 44 percent who thought it was. Respondents also disapproved of Bush's handling of the situation in Iraq by a 58 to 40 percent margin, and 57 percent of the 1,007 adults surveyed by telephone from January 12-16 were not confident that the upcoming elections in Iraq would lead to a stable government. Similarly, a USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll published in the nationally distributed newspaper showed that Americans believed it was a mistake sending troops to Iraq by a 52-to-47 percent margin. Also based on a telephone survey of 1,007 adults, taken January 14-16, the USA Today poll found that respondents were now more or less equally divided as to whether the US should keep, increase, reduce current troops levels in Iraq. Until September 2004, the prevailing opinion in polls was that troop levels should be maintained.
Sanctioned by election, blessed by God...
The Coming Wars
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
What the Pentagon can now do in secret.
The New Yorker, 17 January 2005
George W. Bush’s reëlection was not his only victory last fall. The President and his national-security advisers have consolidated control over the military and intelligence communities’ strategic analyses and covert operations to a degree unmatched since the rise of the post-Second World War national-security state. Bush has an aggressive and ambitious agenda for using that control—against the mullahs in Iran and against targets in the ongoing war on terrorism—during his second term. The C.I.A. will continue to be downgraded, and the agency will increasingly serve, as one government consultant with close ties to the Pentagon put it, as “facilitators” of policy emanating from President Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney. This process is well under way.
Despite the deteriorating security situation in Iraq, the Bush Administration has not reconsidered its basic long-range policy goal in the Middle East: the establishment of democracy throughout the region. Bush’s reëlection is regarded within the Administration as evidence of America’s support for his decision to go to war. It has reaffirmed the position of the neoconservatives in the Pentagon’s civilian leadership who advocated the invasion, including Paul Wolfowitz, the Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Douglas Feith, the Under-secretary for Policy. According to a former high-level intelligence official, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff shortly after the election and told them, in essence, that the naysayers had been heard and the American people did not accept their message. Rumsfeld added that America was committed to staying in Iraq and that there would be no second-guessing.
“This is a war against terrorism, and Iraq is just one campaign. The Bush Administration is looking at this as a huge war zone,” the former high-level intelligence official told me. “Next, we’re going to have the Iranian campaign. We’ve declared war and the bad guys, wherever they are, are the enemy. This is the last hurrah—we’ve got four years, and want to come out of this saying we won the war on terrorism.”
SEE ALSO:
 Bush Says Election Ratified Iraq Policy
No U.S. Troop Withdrawal Date Is Set
By Jim VandeHei and Michael A. Fletcher
Washington Post, 16 January 2005
President Bush said the public's decision to reelect him was a ratification of his approach toward Iraq and that there was no reason to hold any administration officials accountable for mistakes or misjudgments in prewar planning or managing the violent aftermath. "We had an accountability moment, and that's called the 2004 elections," Bush said in an interview with The Washington Post. "The American people listened to different assessments made about what was taking place in Iraq, and they looked at the two candidates, and chose me."
Following the 'chain of causation'? Not a chance in hell...
High-Ranking Officers May Face Prosecution in Iraqi Prisoner Abuse, Military Officials Say
By KATE ZERNIKE
NYT, 17 January 2005
...at Specialist Graner's trial, prosecutors did not deny sworn testimony that military intelligence soldiers, civilian interrogators and some officers asked soldiers to carry out questionable treatment, like striking detainees and having female soldiers point and laugh as male detainees showered. Several witnesses at the Graner trial testified that Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the highest-ranking military intelligence officer at Abu Ghraib, and Lt. Col. Steven Jordan, the head of the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the prison, had either known about or specifically encouraged tactics like using dogs to threaten detainees. The two men were among five officers recommended for discipline in a Pentagon report in August, which said they bore responsibility for what happened even though they were not directly involved in abuse. That report implicated 29 other military intelligence soldiers in at least 44 cases of abuse from July 2003 to February 2004, including one death, beatings, using dogs to threaten adolescent detainees, and having prisoners stripped naked and left for hours in dark, poorly ventilated cells that were stifling hot or freezing cold.  The report said that while the claims of Specialist Graner and other military police soldiers that they had been acting at the behest of military intelligence were "self-serving," they did "have some basis in fact." A classified portion of the report said Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the former top commander in Iraq, approved the use there of some interrogation practices intended to be limited to captives held in Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
U.S. Lowers Expectations for Once-Heralded Iraq Vote
By Saul Hudson
Reuters, 16 January 2005
Unable to deliver on its lofty goal of bringing democracy to Iraq through the Jan. 30 elections, the Bush administration is pressing a damage-control campaign to lower expectations for the vote.
Iraqi Security Forces Killed in Insurgent Attacks
By REUTERS, 17 January 2005
ReutersInsurgents detonated a suicide car bomb at police headquarters in the Iraqi town of Baiji on Monday, killing at least 10 people, and shot dead eight Iraqi soldiers at a checkpoint in attacks ahead of Jan. 30 polls. Witnesses said burned bodies were scattered in the compound in Baiji, an oil refining town in the Sunni heartland north of Baghdad. A police official said at least 20 people were wounded, mostly police. Near Baquba, another guerrilla stronghold northeast of the capital, gunmen opened fire on a checkpoint and killed eight soldiers, a National Guard officer said. Iraqi security forces have borne the brunt of insurgent attacks as the polls approach. Election officials have also been repeatedly targeted and threatened, and voting centers -- many in schools -- have been hit by insurgents.
[Grand Delusion]
...``We will provide broad area security coverage, while the Iraqi military and police provide security closer to the polling sites and polling centers. You won't see coalition forces at the polling centers,'' the top U.S. commander in Iraq, General George Casey, said in a statement Monday. ...``Is there going to be violence on election day? There is, but it's important that we understand what's happening here. It's not just about violence,'' he said. ``It's about former regime loyalists and foreign terrorists murdering innocent Iraqis and Iraqi security forces to stop them from exercising their right to vote.''
Secret democracy...
Rising Violence and Fear Drive Iraq Campaigners Underground
By DEXTER FILKINS
NYT, 16 January 2005
The threat of death hung so heavily over the election rally, held this week on the fifth floor of the General Factory for Vegetable Oil, that the speakers refused to say whether they were candidates at all. "Too dangerous," said Hussein Ali, who solicited votes for the United Iraqi Alliance, a party fielding dozens of candidates for the elections here. "It's a secret."

Cultural terrorism?
Babylon Wrecked by War
US-led forces leave a trail of destruction and contamination in architectural site of world importance.
Rory McCarthy in Baghdad, and Maev Kennedy
The Guardian, 15 January 2005
SEE ALSO
Cultural Vandalism
The Guardian, 15 January 2005
The damage wrought by the construction of an American military base in the ruins of the ancient city of Babylon must rank as one of the most reckless acts of cultural vandalism in recent memory. And all the more so because it was unnecessary and avoidable.
SEE ALSO:
Hanging Garden and Tower of Babel (The Guardian)
Abu Ghraib Abuse Firms are Rewarded - Administration Torture Papers to Be Examined Later this Month
The Guardian, 16 January 2005
Three employees of CACI International and Titan - working at Abu Ghraib as civilian contractors - were separately accused of abusive behaviour. The report on the Abu Ghraib scandal implicated three civilian contractors in the abuses: Steven Stefanowicz from CACI International and John Israel and Adel Nakhla from Titan. Stefanowicz was charged with giving orders that 'equated to physical abuse', Israel of lying under oath and Naklha of raping an Iraqi boy. It was also alleged that CACI interrogators used dogs to scare prisoners, placed detainees in unauthorised 'stress positions' and encouraged soldiers to abuse prisoners. Titan employees, it has been alleged, hit detainees and stood by while soldiers physically abused prisoners. Investigators also discovered systemic problems of management and training - including the fact that a third of CACI International's staff at Abu Ghraib had never received formal military interrogation training. Despite demands by human rights groups in the US that the two companies be barred from further contracts in Iraq - where CACI alone employed almost half of all interrogators and analysts at Abu Ghraib - CACI International has been awarded a $16 million renewal of its contract. Titan, meanwhile, has been awarded a new contract worth $164m.
[Also] ...the controversy over abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay is likely to be reignited later this month with the publication of The Torture Papers: The Legal Road to Abu Ghraib by Cambridge University Press, the first compendium of the so called 'torture memos' of the Bush administration. Compiled from material already in the public domain and other material acquired under the US Freedom of Information Act, it documents the chilling progress in the Bush administration's legal advice that allowed it to redefine the meaning of torture so much that it felt able to use interrogation techniques that amounted to the most serious physical abuse.
War's 'Hidden Cost' Called Heavy
Billions eyed to replenish forces
By Bryan Bender
Boston Globe 14 January 2005
A forthcoming request for additional funds to continue waging war in Iraq will not begin to address the "hidden cost" of the conflict, according to Pentagon officials and other government authorities who say that tens of billions of dollars more will eventually be needed to repair or replace heavily used equipment and to compensate for the wear and tear on members of the armed services. ...If the war were to end today, according to a preliminary estimate by the Congressional Budget Office that was described by officials who have been briefed on it, the Army would still need at least $20 billion more than budgeted over the next three years just to be at the same level of preparedness as before the war. All four branches of the military recently completed a "stress study" ordered a year ago by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to determine the impact the war is having on equipment. "What they found was an amazing toll on combat vehicles, generators, just about everything," said a defense analyst involved in the study. "At some point it doesn't make sense to overhaul the equipment, you have to replace it."

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COMMENTARY

###

A Demobilized Press in a Global Free-Fire Zone
Tom Englehardt
TomDispatch, 22 Janunary 2005

"'It's a finesse to give power to Rumsfeld -- giving him the right to act swiftly, decisively, and lethally,' the first Pentagon adviser told me. 'It's a global free-fire zone.'" (Seymour Hersh, The Coming Wars, the New Yorker magazine)

...Perhaps this is one reason why so many of our papers are now hemorrhaging readers. If you want to read about what's not being said "publicly" in Washington or elsewhere; if you want someone to think on a global scale that befits Bush administration strategists, if you want someone to connect the dots and suggest ways our world is linked together, you really have to turn elsewhere. If, to take a small but telling example, you want to know what Seymour Hersh thought of coverage of his piece, don't expect a New York Times or Washington Post reporter to call him and ask. That would be stepping too far outside the box. You need to listen instead to Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! (or catch the transcript at the always lively Alternet.org website). Only there will you be able to read of Hersh's bemusement that the media more or less missed his real story:

"Goodman: Can you explain where the CIA and the Pentagon fit into this picture?

"Hersh: Well, that's actually to me the most interesting part to the story that I wrote -- not about Iran, because you can almost argue that, of course, we're doing surveillance. I'm sort of amazed that it became such a big story in the last 24 hours or 36 hours. The real issue -- what the story is about, is the fact that the diminution of the CIA is unbelievable…. More is totally centralized in the White House and the Pentagon than since the rise of the national security state after World War II in the Cold War. We now have the White House and a Pentagon that basically dominates the process. The C.I.A. has been marginalized."

Only listening to Goodman's show would you find out that Hersh is trying to hook another big fish:

"…that the President, when it came to prisoner interrogation issues and the intelligence from it and operational stuff, is much more actively involved in a way we don't see than we might think. We always see him as sort of not really getting tuned in. I think in this stuff, he's really more tuned in, but I -- you know, I have to prove that."

If you wanted to get an early heads-up on what the Hersh piece meant in terms of freeing the President of all democratic fetters, you would have had to leave the mainstream for the invaluable antiwar.com website where their fiery libertarian columnist Justin Raimondo wrote "Exporting Democracy -- or Terrorism? Seymour Hersh exposes the scheme to make America a terrorist state" ("[Hersh's] scoop is that we have decided to join the Axis of Evil ostensibly in order to fight it. If I thought for a moment that Americans can live with that, then I'd wear the 'anti-American' label like a badge of honor.")

If you wanted to find somebody trying to weave together a picture of neocon dreams of global mastery, whether in relation to Iran, Syria, North Korea, or all of them together, you probably would have to check out Jim Lobe of Inter Press News whose indefatigable work can only be found on-line in this country. If you wanted to read a piece by someone who wasn't willing to consider the "orange revolution" in the Ukraine purely as a democratic triumph in a geopolitical void, you would have had to turn to the Nation magazine to check out Stephen F. Cohen's recent piece of media criticism, The Media's New Cold War.

"In most of these former Soviet regions where the Kremlin is accused of 'imperial meddling,' from the Baltics in the West and Georgia in the South to the states of Central Asia, there are now US and NATO military bases, with more being planned. They too go unmentioned [in the media], along with the essential question, widely discussed by scholars, of whether they are part of an ever-expanding American empire."

Nowhere in the mainstream, in fact, are you likely to find an article that would even think of linking our new bases in the former SSRs of Central Asia to events in the Ukraine, no less consider them, from the Kremlin's point of view, as part of a "tightening noose." And who is bothering to say -- even when Condoleezza Rice pointedly mentions the otherwise nearly forgotten former SSR of Belarus as ripe for democracy -- that the Bush people have long been dreaming feverishly of pushing Russia (from Central Asia to the Baltic Sea) back to something like its 14th century boundaries -- or that this sort of dream of "rollback," even in the rabid early 1950s, would have seemed slightly mad, but now is increasingly a geopolitical reality? Encirclement? A new Cold War? World War IV? (Note, for instance, that the Russians and the Chinese, though hardly commented on in our media, are preparing massive joint war games for the first time this year.) From the media's point of view, Alfred E. Neuman's old motto might suffice: What me worry?

Here's the strange thing: In a world where Gaia -- the Earth as a single throbbing organism -- is already a cliché; where "globalization" remains a buzzword; and where we happen to be ruled by the greatest geopolitical dreamers and gamblers in our history, our demobilized media treats the world, if at all, as a set of hopeless fragments and just doesn't consider puzzling them together part of the job description. If you want to grasp our world as it is, you might actually have to click off that TV, use your local paper to wrap the fish, and head for the Internet. Tom

###

Rice Doublespeak at Senate
Juan Cole
Informed Comment, 20 January 2005

The transcript of the Rice/Boxer exchange is worth reading in full. Rice's performance is breathtakingly bad, and Boxer has all the quotes and facts at her fingertips. The issue is that Condoleeza Rice engaged in demagoguery before the Iraq war. She invoked the image of a mushroom cloud over the United States. But George Tenet had told her the evidence was weak in that regard. The State Department Intelligence and Research division thought the whole nuclear bit was far-fetched. But Rice kept on saying these alarmist things nevertheless.

In the end, Rice falls back on the same brain-dead rhetorical strategy as George W. Bush. Saddam was a threat because he is intrinsically evil. He is so evil that he can be a threat even though all he had in his arsenal were those spitballs toward which Zell Miller showed such derision at the Republican National Convention. Saddam was a threat to the region, she says. She is still saying this now, today. Saddam was not a threat to the region in 2002. That is ridiculous. Iraq was also not a threat to the US. This turns out to be the Achilles Heel of any doctrine of preemptive war. It would require, in order to be justified, much better intelligence than is usually available on the capabilities and intensions of the enemy. Rice still won't admit this, which means she may drag us into further wars with further gross mistakes in judgment.

On Wednesday, Rice testified again. Now aware that Senator Boxer and others were complaining about her rigidity, she finally admitted that the US had made some serious errors in Iraq. But the example she gave, of reconstruction work, was disingenuous. Actually the US companies working in relatively safe places like Basra and Sulaymaniyah have done very good reconstruction work. She seems to be trying to find some mistake she could admit to, which would actually be the mistake of the private sector and not of the Bush administration! For an incoming Secretary of State not to be willing to recognize that Iraq is a mess in part because of US policies is to translate the realm of politics into some sort of fantasyland. And in a way, that is what has been happening in US politics since Reagan was elected and Peggy Noonan began writing those syrupy speeches.

Senators Chafee and Biden urged Rice to try to engage Iran. Biden suggested she
tell Bush that dropping some bombs on Iran's nuclear facilities and then hoping that the young people in blue jeans would toss out the mullas was probably not going to work. Biden has developed this wonderful sardonic sense of what exactly the Bush administration ideologues are thinking, and is able to puncture these insubstantial balloons masterfully, building on decades of experience in foreign affairs.

Rice responded concerning Iran that it was hard to have an engagement with a country that wanted to see Israel destroyed. It is such a simple-minded thing to say. Uh, let me see. In the 1980s wasn't it the Khomeini regime that sold Israel petroleum in exchange for spare parts for its American weaponry? Wasn't it the Israelis who put Reagan up to the Iran-Contra scandal by suggesting that the US ship TOWs to Iran in return for an end to the Lebanese hostage crisis? Even when it was more radical, and despite all the rhetoric, Iran was willing to deal with Israel in ways that helped the latter enormously.

It is true that some Iranian leaders, like Rafsanjani, say frightening things about Israel. But Rafsanjani has no executive power, and when he was president he didn't actually act on such sentiments. The point of engaging the Iranian regime would be to gradually ween it away from such extremism. Iran hasn't launched any aggressive wars in the region, or threatened to use weapons of mass destruction, unlike some other countries (the US had full diplomatic relations with Iraq in the 1980s at a
time when it had done both of these things.) I am very uncomfortable in having US national security policy and diplomacy dictated by how politicians in a country talk about our non-Nato allies (with whom, by the way, we do not even have a mutual defense pact). And I am very suspicious that now that Iraq is a basket case, all of a sudden Ariel Sharon is calling on the US to attack Iran.

If Rice is going to be a successful Secretary of State, she simply has to get back control of US foreign policy from the Likudniks in the Bush administration.

###

Permanent Presence
 Ari Berman
The Nation, 18 January 2005

In his first debate with President Bush, John Kerry made a surprisingly bold assertion about US policy toward Iraq: "I think a critical component of success in Iraq is being able to convince the Iraqis and the Arab world that the United States doesn't have long-term designs on it," Kerry said. "As I understand it, we're building some 14 military bases there now, and some people say they've got a rather permanent concept to them."

Though the media ignored Kerry's statement and failed to do any substantive follow-up research, his comments were well-grounded in reality. On the day of the debate the Christian Science Monitor spotlighted the findings of defense specialist John Pike, whose website, GlobalSecurity.org, located twelve "enduring bases" in Iraq, including satellite photos and names. In March, the Chicago Tribune reported that US engineers were constructing fourteen such long-term encampments--the number Kerry referred to. The New York Times previously placed the number at four.

While the exact figure may change, suspicions of undisclosed US imperial plans--exemplified by permanent military bases--rightfully linger. Before the war, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz suggested moving US troops stationed in Saudi Arabia into Iraq. In October, a survey by the University of Maryland's Program on International Policy Attitudes found that two-thirds of respondents disapproved of a permanent military presence, even though more than half thought the US would build the bases anyway.

Now comes a report in the New York Sun by Eli Lake revealing that the Pentagon is building a permanent military communications system in Iraq, a necessary foundation for any lasting troop presence. The new network will comprise twelve communications towers throughout Iraq, linking Camp Victory in Baghdad to other existing (and future) bases across the country, eventually connecting with US bases in Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Afghanistan.

"People need to get realistic and think in terms of our presence being in Iraq for a generation or until democratic stability in the region is reached," Dewey Clarridge, the CIA's former chief of Arab operations (and Iran-contra point man), told the Sun.

The fabled "exit strategy" may be not to exit. Thomas Donnelly, a defense specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, said the new communication system resembles those built in West Germany and the Balkans, places where American troops remain today. "The operational advantages of US bases in Iraq should be obvious for other power-projection missions in the region," Donnelly wrote in an AEI policy paper.

Next time the Bush Administration hints at withdrawing troops, keep these grand plans in mind.

###

Toothless Tigers And Tort Reform
Robert B. Reich
TomPaine.com, December 22, 2004

The White House says the Food and Drug administration is doing a "spectacular" job. Really? The FDA didn’t respond to warning signs that block-buster painkillers like Celebrex and Vioxx increased the risk of heart attacks. Worse yet, its own drug-safety officer says the agency suppressed his research showing the apparent dangers of Vioxx. Belatedly, the FDA is now looking into the potential risks of Naproxin, an ingredient in many over-the-counter pain relievers. The FDA also failed to warn the public that antidepressants increase the risk of suicide among children who take them.

"Spectacular?" I don’t think so. In fact, one might conclude that the Food and Drug Administration is failing in its core mission to protect consumers from harm. It’s a toothless tiger.

Meanwhile, new legislation is winding its way through Congress that would prevent people who are hurt by drugs approved by the FDA from winning large damage awards against companies that made them. FDA approval would shield drug makers from having to pay anything more than $250,000 even when it’s proven that they negligently caused someone more than $250,000 of harm. Congressional sponsors understand this cap on damages will end lawsuits against drug companies because personal-injury lawyers won’t want to take on the risks and costs of such cases. If this bill passes, companies like Pfizer and Merck—now facing a flood of lawsuits because of Celebrex and Vioxx—won’t have to worry.

So we’ve got an FDA that’s not protecting consumers from harm, and pending legislation that makes it almost impossible for people who are hurt by drugs approved by the FDA to sue for damages. The question must be asked: How is the public going to be protected if the FDA remains weak and if private lawsuits are cut off?

You might ask the same question all over government these days. Pick an agency—not just the FDA, but the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Consumer Product Safety Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and so on. They’re supposed to protect the public. But they’re all understaffed, their budgets have been whacked, and many of them are in the pockets of the very companies and industries they’re supposed to regulate.

At exactly the same time, Republicans are clamoring for what they call "tort reform." Tort reform is a nice way of saying that people who are harmed by companies shouldn’t be able to sue them and collect damages.

They can’t have it both ways. Either regulatory agencies have to be made tougher and more independent, and given the resources they need to protect the public, or we’ve got to rely on courts and private lawsuits to make sure companies have every financial incentive to protect the public. Absent both—tough regulators and the threat of private lawsuits—the public is at serious risk. If you’re worried about Celebrex and Vioxx, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

This commentary originally appeared on Marketplace, public radio's only daily business news program, and is reprinted via a special arrangement between TomPaine.com and Robert Reich. Marketplace is produced by Minnesota Public Radio and is heard on 322 public radio stations nationwide. More online at www.marketplace.org.

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A Nation of Faith and Religious Illiterates
 By Stephen Prothero
Stephen Prothero teaches at Boston University and is author of "American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon" (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003).
LA Times, 12 January 2005

The sociologist Peter Berger once remarked that if India is the most religious country in the world and Sweden the least, then the United States is a nation of Indians ruled by Swedes. Not anymore. With a Jesus lover in the Oval Office and a faith-based party in control of both houses of Congress, the United States is undeniably a nation of believers ruled by the same.

Things are different in Europe, and not just in Sweden. The Dutch are four times less likely than Americans to believe in miracles, hell and biblical inerrancy. The euro does not trust in God. But here is the paradox: Although Americans are far more religious than Europeans, they know far less about religion.

In Europe, religious education is the rule from the elementary grades on. So Austrians, Norwegians and the Irish can tell you about the Seven Deadly Sins or the Five Pillars of Islam. But, according to a 1997 poll, only one out of three U.S. citizens is able to name the most basic of Christian texts, the four Gospels, and 12% think Noah's wife was Joan of Arc. That paints a picture of a nation that believes God speaks in Scripture but that can't be bothered to read what he has to say.

U.S. Catholics, evangelicals and Jews have been lamenting for some time a crisis of religious literacy in their ranks. But the dangers of religious ignorance are by no means confined to those worried about catechizing their children or cultivating the next generation of clergy.

When Americans debated slavery, almost exclusively on the basis of the Bible, people of all races and classes could follow the debate. They could make sense of its references to the runaway slave in the New Testament book of Philemon and to the year of jubilee, when slaves could be freed, in the Old Testament book of Leviticus. Today it is a rare American who can engage with any sophistication in biblically inflected arguments about gay marriage, abortion or stem cell research.

Since 9/11, President Bush has been telling us that "Islam is a religion of peace," while evangelist Franklin Graham (Billy's son) has insisted otherwise. Who is right? Americans have no way to tell because they know virtually nothing about Islam. Such ignorance imperils our public life, putting citizens in the thrall of talking heads.

How did this happen? How did one of the most religious countries in the world become a nation of religious illiterates? Religious congregations are surely at fault. Churches and synagogues that once inculcated the "fourth R" are now telling the faithful stories "ripped from the headlines" rather than teaching them the Ten Commandments or parsing the Sermon on the Mount (which was delivered, as only one in three Americans can tell you, by Jesus). But most of the fault lies in our elementary and secondary schools.

In a majority opinion in a 1963 church-state case (Abington vs. Schempp), Supreme Court Justice Tom Clark wrote, "It might well be said that one's education is not complete without a study of comparative religion … and its relationship to the advance of civilization." If so, the education of nearly every public school student in the nation is woefully inadequate.

Because of misunderstandings about the 1st Amendment, religious studies are seldom taught in public schools. When they are, instruction typically begins only in high school and with teachers not trained in the subtle distinction between teaching religion (unconstitutional) and teaching about religion (essential).

Though state educational standards no longer ignore religion as they did a decade or so ago, coverage of religion in history and social science textbooks is spotty at best. According to Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center in Arlington, Va., "It is as if we got freedom of religion in 1791 and then we were free from religion after that."

Now that the religious right has triumphed over the secular left, every politician seems determined to get religion. They're all asking "What Would Jesus Do?" — about the war in Iraq, gay marriage, poverty and Social Security. And though the ACLU may rage, it is not un-American to bring religious reasoning into our public debates. In fact, that has been happening ever since George Washington put his hand on a Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. What is un-American is to give those debates over to televangelists of either the secular or the religious variety, to absent ourselves from the discussion by ignorance.

A few days after 9/11, a turbaned Indian American man was shot and killed in Arizona by a bigot who believed the man's dress marked him as a Muslim. But what killed Balbir Singh Sodhi (who was not a Muslim but a Sikh) was not so much bigotry as ignorance. The moral of his story is not just that we need more tolerance. It is that Americans — of both the religious and the secular variety — need to understand religion. Resolving in 2005 to read for yourself either the Bible or the Koran (or both) might not be a bad place to start.

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Don't Torture Yourself (That's His Job)
 By MAUREEN DOWD
NYT, 7 January 2005
The Associated Press headline that came over the wire yesterday said it all: "Gonzales Will Follow Non-Torture Policies."

You know how bad the situation is when the president's choice for attorney general has to formally pledge not to support torture anymore.

Alberto Gonzales may have been willing to legally justify something that was abhorrent to everything America stands for, but it's all relative. Given that Mr. Gonzales is replacing the odious John Ashcroft, Democrats didn't seem inclined to try to derail the Hispanic nominee, even though his memo fostered the atmosphere that led to disgusting scandals in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

Just to get things started on the right foot, though, Mr. Gonzales planned to go the extra mile and offer the quaint, obsolete Senate Democrats a more nuanced explanation of why he called the Geneva Conventions "quaint" and "obsolete."

Before he helped President Bush circumvent the accords and reserve the right to do so "in this or future conflicts," you had to tune in to an old movie with Nazi generals or Vietcong guards if you wanted to see someone sneeringly shrug off the international treaty protecting prisoners from abuse. ("You worthless running dog Chuck Norris! What do we care about your silly Geneva Conventions?")

How are you to believe Mr. Gonzales when he says he's through with torture? His mission is clearly to do whatever he thinks Mr. Bush wants.

All gall is divided into parts, so what's next?

The Commerce Department nominee promising that giveaways to big business will be done with subtlety?

The Environmental Protection Agency nominee promising that the toxin content in water will never rise to Yushchenko level?

It's comforting to start the new year in the hands of a party that cares so much about morals and values.

Tom DeLay and oily House Republicans inaugurated their new term by gutting ethics rules just in case any of them get caught in whatever misconduct they are plotting.

Rummy continued on his oblivious, dissembling path, refusing to admit that he's tapped out the Army and broken the Army Reserve with what Lt. Gen. James Helmly, the frustrated chief of the Army Reserve, calls "dysfunctional" policies. We've gotten so numb on Iraq that when eight American soldiers and over 80 Iraqi police officers get killed, when the governor of Baghdad gets assassinated, and when our puppets plead with Mr. Bush to delay the elections, it all seems like just another week of pre-election maneuvering.

In The Los Angeles Times, we learn that Bush fave Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas "has accepted tens of thousands of dollars worth of gifts since joining the high court, including $1,200 worth of tires, valuable historical items and a $5,000 personal check to help pay a relative's education expenses."

A guy we pay nearly $200,000 a year can't pop for his own tires? Whatever happened to the dignity of the robe? At least we know where our possible future chief justice stands: on the side of personal corruption.

"He also took a free trip aboard a private jet to the exclusive Bohemian Grove club in Northern California - arranged by a wealthy Texas real estate investor who helped run an advocacy group that filed briefs with the Supreme Court," the paper said.

The L.A. Times reviewed the disclosures of all nine justices for the years 1998 through 2003 and found that "Thomas accepted $42,200 in gifts, making him the top recipient. Next in that period was Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, who accepted $5,825 in gifts, mostly small crystal figurines and other items."

Clarence Thomas follows Antonin Scalia's lead on the law. Why not also on ethics? Justice Scalia defended taking his relatives on a ride on Air Force Two to Louisiana with Dick Cheney to go duck hunting, even though the v.p. had an important case before the court, by saying that it would have been a "considerable inconvenience" to fly commercial.

Going through a blistering confirmation hearing where his inappropriate behavior was questioned didn't teach Clarence Thomas much. Can we hope for anything better from Mr. Gonzales after he's waved through to be the man in charge of enforcing our laws?

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Christian Right Vs. Christian Left: Conversations with Conservatives
By Tom Ball
Political Strategy, 3 January 2005

In the wake of the horrific disaster that was the tsunami of 2004, there was, and continues to be an outpouring of good faith across the globe.

As with any event of historic (biblical?) proportions, there are always two sides to the story. In this particular example the sides reflect the core of what we label contemporarily as the 'religious right' and the 'religious left'.

On the left, religion is met with a feeling of nurturance, tolerance and compassion. This is reflected in the lefts immediate reaction to the global disaster -- helping those in need in any way possible -- focusing on those most vulnerable.

On the right, religion is a vehicle of punishment, intolerance, and constant judgment as well as a convenient tool for rationalizing inhumane behavior. This is symbolized by the following conversation (paraphrased to account for imperfect memory):

Just before the new year, I was chatting with a colleague of mine. He's a staunch religious conservative, but generally open to other points of view. I respected him and his opinions...or at least I did.

(So it began...)

Me: This horrific disaster really puts things into perspective going into the new year. It's so sad.

Conservative: You know, I was talking with the 'fruit stand' guy (the person who runs the fruit stand outside our building) who is from that area and he told me that those areas are....like...the areas where things go on that are...you know...not good.

Me: Huh?

Conservative: You know, like when businessmen go to the region...

Me: American businessmen?

Conservative: Any businessmen. They go there and...you know....they give five bucks and their 'taken care of'.

Me: So you're saying that because there are some prostitutes...

Conservatives: ...Well...all types of ...sort of...debauchery.

Me: So like Sodom and Gomorra....

Conservative: (begins quoting some verse from the bible that notes God's displeasure resulted in the Earth 'trembling') You know. It was weird that the day after the earthquake the verse that we happen to read just before dinner (a nightly occurrence I presume) said that (paraphrased), "God's displeasure with disbelievers caused God to make the Earth tremble".

Me: So you're saying that God wiped out thousands of miles of coastland and hundreds of thousands of innocent people because of some prostitution... promoted by Western businessmen?

Conservative: No. No. That's what the fruit stand guy said. (He seemed to back off here as he 'sensed' my disgust with his assertion...yet continued under the guise of the 'fruit stand' guy's claim rather than his own.) It just seems strange that an area where no one believes in the Lord was struck by this thing.

(...so it ended)

Ugh! I don't think I've ever lost respect for somebody more abruptly than I did for this guy that day.

Nevertheless, he is the religious right in a bottle -- "What I believe is correct. There is no other possibility. Anyone who believes otherwise will burn in Hell."

Ironically, what his ultimate argument boiled down to had nothing to do with prostitution, or debauchery in general...only that they didn’t believe that Jesus Christ is the savior of humanity... listen up Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Pagans and all you other infidels.

Apparently, belief in Christ's role as savior is all that matters. Acting humane and decent is otherwise irrelevant...or at least ultimately forgivable. On the other hand, you could be the most decent being on the planet by most measures, but if you fail to pledge allegiance to Christ the savior...burn in Hell.

(Note: I am a very spiritual person, but my philosophy is what sets me (and most progressives) apart from the religious right and what gives rise to my resentment of religious fundamentalism. I believe that people should be good and otherwise there spiritual beliefs are inconsequential to me -- a typical frame of the religious left. In contrast, the right seeks to infuse and control with their ideological dogma. What others believe supercedes their actions...and what they believe must conform to the right-wing perception of an ever-vengeful creator.

This makes it painfully simple to understand why the religious right is able to see past Bush's many failures and dubious goals -- focusing instead on his proclaimed belief in Christ as savior.

George W. Bush: 'God-Mandated, 911-approved'

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