Ah, yer Murtha wears Army boots

One of the big news items of the past few days, of course, was the introduction of H.J.Res. 73 in the House by John Murtha (D-PA) calling for withdrawal from Iraq. Leaving out the "Whereas"es and the "Be it resolved"s, this is what the resolution said:

Section 1. The deployment of United States forces in Iraq, by direction of Congress, is hereby terminated and the forces involved are to be redeployed at the earliest practicable date.

Section 2. A quick-reaction U.S. force and an over-the-horizon presence of U.S. Marines shall be deployed in the region.

Section 3. The United States of America shall pursue security and stability in Iraq through diplomacy.

While no timetable was mentioned in the resolution, while speaking to reporters, Murtha estimated that no more than six months should be necessary for the withdrawal. His press statement (Thanks to Tim at Democratic Left Infoasis for the link.), after arguing that the war was damaging US military readiness, offered a simple but devastating list of particulars about Iraq drawn from the DOD's own quarterly reports to Congress:

Oil production and energy production are below pre-war levels. Our reconstruction efforts have been crippled by the security situation. Only $9 billion of the $18 billion appropriated for reconstruction has been spent. Unemployment remains at about 60 percent. Clean water is scarce. Only $500 million of the $2.2 billion appropriated for water projects has been spent. And most importantly, insurgent incidents have increased from about 150 per week to over 700 in the last year. Instead of attacks going down over time and with the addition of more troops, attacks have grown dramatically. Since the revelations at Abu Ghraib, American casualties have doubled. An annual State Department report in 2004 indicated a sharp increase in global terrorism. ...

A poll recently conducted shows that over 80% of Iraqis are strongly opposed to the presence of coalition troops, and about 45% of the Iraqi population believe attacks against American troops are justified. I believe we need to turn Iraq over to the Iraqis. ...

Our military has done everything that has been asked of them, the U.S. can not accomplish anything further in Iraq militarily. IT IS TIME TO BRING THEM HOME.

All of which the GOPpers and assorted other buffoons could not allow to be said undisrupted, so the Mean Machine was turned up to full-throated roar. GOPper Kay Granger of Texas called it "reprehensible and irresponsible ... a policy of retreat and defeatism." Jean Schmidt (R-OH) notoriously declared she had a "message" for Murtha: "Cowards cut and run - Marines never do." (She later retracted the statement, insisting that oh my goodness, she never meant that to refer to anyone in Congress, on my no! Some GOPpers tried to defend her by saying she didn't know Murtha had been a Marine. I have no clue why that was supposed to make it better.)

Over at the White House, Scotty McMouthpiece accused Murtha of advocating "surrender to the terrorists" and dragged out what he apparently regarded as an ultimate insult: He said Murtha was "endorsing the policy positions of Michael Moore." GASP! The crowd draws back in unified horror!

The very next day, the House misleadership pushed for a vote. But not on Murtha's resolution, rather on a GOPper alternative which simply said: "It is the sense of the House of Representatives that the deployment of United States forces in Iraq be terminated immediately."

This was, of course, designed to fail. It was also intended to serve as a way both to embarrass Dums who are not ready to actually end the war any time in the foreseeable future and to be able to claim the issue of withdrawal had been dealt with. And of course, fail it did, by a vote of 403-3 as the Dims chose to vote against it in an attempt to drain it of any significance. (The three brave souls who took the opportunity to speak truth to power were Jose Serrano [D-NY], Robert Wexler [D-FL], and Cynthia McKinney [D-GA]. Six more Dems voted "present." They were Jim McDermott [WA], Jerrold Nadler [NY], Maurice Hinchey [NY], Michael Capuano [MA], Major Owens [NY], and William Lacy Clay [MO].)

Okay, so here's my question about all of this: If the pro-war crowd was so sure Murtha's resolution was a loser, supported only by the "extreme liberal wing" among the Dummycrats - you know, Michael Moore and alla them there folks - so sure that voting for it would be embarrassing, why didn't they schedule a vote on Murtha's own resolution? Why did they instead engineer a vote on their version, which stripped away any nuance and eschewed phrases like "earliest practicable date" in favor of the meaningless (and physically-impossible) "immediately?" Why did they change it from a binding statement to a "sense of the House" resolution?

I can see only one answer: They were scared. Scared that Murtha's resolution would get a fair, a noticeable, measure of support. I don't think for a second it would have passed; there are still too many in Congress terrified of being labeled "soft on commu-," excuse me, "terrorism." But the GOPpers know how to count votes and I strongly suspect they didn't like the numbers they saw. Personally, I think it may have gotten as many as 100 votes. No, that's nowhere near a majority, but it's more than the first moves calling for withdrawal from Vietnam got. And it would have been more than enough to demonstrate a genuine level of discomfort in the House about the war, a discomfort encouraging and energizing to those who want to put a stop to the carnage.

Certainly that level of discomfort (and frustration in general) is running higher all the time. The Dem leadership called the way the GOPpers dealt with the resolution "a disgrace" and said it showed an "absence of any sense of shame." When Schmidnik called Murtha a coward,

Democrats booed and shouted her down - causing the House to come to a standstill.

Rep. Harold Ford, D-Tenn., charged across the chamber's center aisle screaming that Republicans were making an uncalled-for personal attack. "You guys are pathetic. Pathetic," yelled Rep. Marty Meehan, D-Mass.

Other than Murtha's resolution itself, I think that's the best bit of news to come out of this. I wonder when was the last time the House was stopped in its tracks like that.

So yes, I think the were scared and that they had cause to be. If I'm right about that (and of course I think I am, otherwise I wouldn't have said it), that would also explain two other things which otherwise don't seem to make much sense.

The first is that right in the middle of this, word came out, CNN reported, that

[t]he top U.S. commander in Iraq has submitted a plan to the Pentagon for withdrawing troops in Iraq, according to a senior defense official.

Gen. George Casey submitted the plan to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. It includes numerous options and recommends that brigades - usually made up of about 2,000 soldiers each - begin pulling out of Iraq early next year.

Ah, so a withdrawal is already in the works! Relax, everyone, things are well in hand! However, later in the article, well below the soothing "pull out ... early next year" lead, it says that

[t]he plan, which would withdraw a limited amount of troops during 2006, requires that a host of milestones be reached before troops are withdrawn.

Top Pentagon officials have repeatedly discussed some of those milestones: Iraqi troops must demonstrate that they can handle security without U.S. help; the country's political process must be strong; and reconstruction and economic conditions must show signs of stability.

In other words, this is essentially the same plans that have been floating around for some time with the same requirements for anything more than a token but politically-useful-heading-into-the-fall-elections withdrawal. There is absolutely nothing new here, no change from existing policy, nothing to report. Announcing it now would seem to have only one purpose: defusing support for Murtha's resolution.

The other otherwise-odd news has RawStory reporting that

Republican lawmakers say that ties between Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) and his brother's lobbying firm, KSA Consulting, may warrant investigation by the House ethics committee, ROLL CALL reports Friday. ...

According to a June 13 article in The Los Angeles Times, the fiscal 2005 defense appropriations bill included more than $20 million in funding for at least 10 companies for whom KSA lobbied. Carmen Scialabba, a longtime Murtha aide, works at KSA as well.

This sudden devotion to ethics on what would appear to be a relatively minor matter in comparison to what some GOPpers are dealing with these days, particularly as it's based on an accusation made over five months ago, would seem curious but for the timing, when it can be taken as another way to drain Murtha's support and as a warning to others: If we can't slime you as soft on terrorism, we'll slime you some other way.

Bottom line on all this: The hawks are running scared. They have lost the argument, they have lost the war, they are losing their grip on the public mind.

Public support for the conflict has dropped sharply over the last few months. Only 35 percent of those surveyed in a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll published Monday supported the Bush administration's handling of the conflict, and 54 percent said the invasion was a mistake.

The poll also found that 19 percent of Americans want to see the troops come home now, and 33 percent said they wanted them home within a year. Only 38 percent said they should remain "as long as needed."

And just to be clear, there is no overlap between those first two figures. (Complete results can be found here.) To the degree the poll is accurate (the margin of error was +/-3%), a majority of Americans want the troops out within a year. Murtha's position - get them home in about six months - is, contrary to the Mean Machine, not only acceptable, it's quite mainstream. Gee, I guess Michael Moore ain't so "radical," after all.

In fact, just for fun, a quick calculation: So 19% want the troops out now, and 52% (19+33) want them out in no more than a year. Let's just say for the heck of it that the level of support for a six-month time frame splits that difference, that is, a little over 1/3 of the public would go for that. Translate that into an equal proportion of votes in the House and Murtha's resolution would have gotten 154 votes (435 x .355, rounded down). Do you or do you not think a result like that would have rocked the hawks (and the media) back on their heels?

So yes, they are running scared. They are losing on this and they know it. And the one thing they are desperate to do now, and why all the manipulation about Murtha's resolution, is that they want to avoid legitimizing opposition. The only thing they have left is the sense among the majority that they are not the majority, that others do not feel as they do. Murtha threatened to strip that from them and in so doing give voice to the scores of millions among us who are a combination of discouraged, fed up, and outraged.

And giving the people a voice that they can't control or manipulate is perhaps the one thing they fear most.

Footnote: One thing I didn't see in any of the new accounts but discovered when trying to look up the text of the resolution on Thomas is that Murtha had 13 cosponsors: Xavier Becerra (CA-31), Michael Capuano, (MA-8), Michael Doyle (PA-14), Rush Holt (NJ-12), Sheila Jackson-Lee (TX-18), Barbara Lee (CA-9), Zoe Lofgren (CA-16), James McGovern (MA-3), Michael McNulty (NY-21), James Moran (VA-8), Charles Rangel (NY-15), Hilda Solis (CA-32), and Anthony Weiner (NY-9).

Division in the ranks

The creationists and their faux-named "intelligent design" ilk, including their front group the Discovery Institute, were undoubtedly buoyed when Pope Benedict XVI - who I still think of by his previous moniker of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger - claimed last week that

the universe was made by an "intelligent project" and criticizing those who in the name of science say its creation was without direction or order;

i.e., was not consciously done for an intended purpose. This, it seems to me, is part of a deliberate campaign to undermine and reverse the Vatican's earlier position on evolution expressed in 1996 by John Paul II, who said it is "more than just a hypothesis." Back on July 7, Austrian Archbishop Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn fired an earlier salvo in an op-ed in the New York Times in which he argued that

[e]volution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not.

He also called John Paul's statement "rather vague and unimportant."

In October, Schoenborn tried to finesse his statement, saying it was all a "misunderstanding." He even had praise for Darwin, calling The Origin of Species "one of the very great works of intellectual history" - but not, interestingly, a great work of science. He also said that

"I see no problem combining belief in the Creator with the theory of evolution, under one condition - that the limits of a scientific theory are respected. ...

"It is fully reasonable to assume some sense or design even if the scientific method demands restrictions that shut out this question," said the cardinal.

Or, to put it more bluntly, he can accept science as long as science allows him to continue to "assume" that "the things of the world" were consciously designed for some purpose, even if evolution was the means to the end chosen.

Interestingly, in that he comes close to a position I used to sarcastically suggest to creationists before they tried to dress up their assumptions in the language of science: "I can't imagine why," I used to say, "people who can conceive of a being who could create the entire universe in one fell swoop can't conceive of a being that could create evolution." Nevertheless, while Schoenborn did back off some, the central contention that evolution cannot be "an unguided, unplanned process" stands unretracted.

So it was good to be reminded that even in the hierarchy of the Catholic Church, not everyone is looking for loopholes in science.

The Vatican's chief astronomer said Friday that "intelligent design" isn't science and doesn't belong in science classrooms, the latest high-ranking Roman Catholic official to enter the evolution debate in the United States.

The Rev. George Coyne, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, said placing intelligent design theory alongside that of evolution in school programs was "wrong" and was akin to mixing apples with oranges.

"Intelligent design isn't science even though it pretends to be," the ANSA news agency quoted Coyne as saying on the sidelines of a conference in Florence. "If you want to teach it in schools, intelligent design should be taught when religion or cultural history is taught, not science."

Coyne, a devout Catholic,

reaffirmed God's role in creation, but said science explains the history of the universe.

He argued that God should be thought of more as "an encouraging parent," by which if I understand correctly, he envisions God as trying to advise us how to avoid screwing things up without actually making decisions.

This is apparently not the first time Coyne has held that so-called ID isn't science. It'll be interesting to see what follows now, since he has spoken again, this time right after the Pope's remarks. Benedict née Ratzinger is not a man to tolerate or forget dissent and the reaction to Coyne from the Vatican may tell us how serious the church hierarchy is about undoing its previous, even if hardly ringing, endorsement of evolution.

It's beginning to look a lot like...

...the '60s! Or so an AP item from Tuesday can lead one to hope.

Vice President Dick Cheney was heckled by peace protesters Tuesday as he spoke at the groundbreaking for a public policy center honoring former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker.

During Cheney's remarks, about a half-dozen people protesting the war in Iraq yelled, "War, what is it good for?" and held up a large banner saying, "Peace Now."

One of the things that marked the strength of the anti-Vietnam War movement was the fact that administration officials couldn't go anywhere without facing protestors. Lyndon Johnson got to the point where his public appearances were limited to helicoptering into a military base, making a speech, and flying back to Washington.

We're still a good ways from that, but I have to admit that some recent events have made me more hopeful, given me a sense that people are at long last starting to get sick of the BS they've been getting force-fed. There's nothing big or singularly persuasive that I can point to, just a feeling born of some little things - but over the years I've learned to trust my instincts.

One thing, of course, is Shrub's falling popularity, with an approval rating running around 35-37% depending on the poll and the day. And once that solid base of support starts to give, one thing leads to another. AFP reported on Tuesday that

USA Today noted that "for the first time - albeit by a narrow 49 percent to 48 percent - a plurality disapprove of the way Bush is handling the issue of terrorism."

Six in 10 also objected to his handling of Iraq, the economy and immigration. And a whopping 71 percent disapprove of his efforts on controlling federal spending, the poll showed.

What's driving this? Two things are primary, I'd say: One, of course, is Iraq, on which issue discontent is growing right along with the casualty count and the sense that the government has no idea of how to put an end to it, that it just stretches into the future. The other is the fact that, according to a recent poll, a majority of Americans say the indictment of Lewis Libby is a serious issue that "indicates wider problems 'with ethical wrongdoing' in the White House."

And by a 3 to 1 ratio, 46 percent to 15 percent, Americans say the level of honesty and ethics in the government has declined rather than risen under Bush.

The war has sent hairline fractures through the Bushites' base of public support, fractures which the Libby case have opened. Once the Shrub gang is seen as just another group of crooked, selfish politicians, the resistance to questioning them on all fronts is seriously weakened, even to the point of collapse. Now, this may not do the Dummycrats much good since they're not polling a whole lot better, but that doesn't concern me. The shift in attitude it represents does.

Or try this: An AOL online poll asked people to compare Shrub and Bill Clinton. Now, of course, online polls don't mean a whole lot; the participants are self-selected and may well not reflect the public as a whole (or even AOL users as a whole). At the same time, the greater the number of votes, the greater significance can be attached to the numbers - and since AOL only allows one vote per screen name, the ability of anyone to use bots to distort the results is limited. With all that in mind, take this for what it's worth: With 584,000 votes cast, respondents have said Clinton was "more trustworthy" than Bush by a margin of 63%-37%. Asked who was the "better president," a total of 590,000 people have gone for Clinton by 67%-33%. (I don't know if people who don't subscribe to AOL can get to the relevant link, but in any event here it is.)

Again, such polls have great weaknesses - but imagine that same poll being taken four or even two years ago. Do you seriously think the results would have been the same? One more time: It's not the particular numbers and it's not whether or not things are working to the benefit of the Dums. It's the sense of movement.

Along with that is the fact that Shrub's numbers have continued to slip over time: The White House/rightwing talking head talking points aimed at reversing that trend don't seem to be getting traction outside that probably 30-something percent who would respond to Bush dropping a nuke on Iowa by believing it will bring democracy to Iraq or some other country beginning with an "I" somewhere. Or something. But it was a good thing!

I'm hardly the only one to notice it; the bigwigs certainly are smelling something about Iraq:

Senior Bush adviser Dan Bartlett said Thursday that the White House had made a strategic decision to launch a "sustained" campaign to vigorously combat the notion that the administration misled the nation.

As part of that, three times in the last two days Bush and "The Big" Dick Cheney have given speeches attacking Congressional criticism, with Cheney playing the Spiro Agnew role minus the alliteration, calling opponents "dishonest and reprehensible ... opportunists" who are "losing ... their backbone" and are, he said, undermining the morale of US forces. More déjà vu.

They're in trouble and they know it. So do the Dims, who replied in language rather less cautious than they had used before; for example, John Kerry said of "The Big" that "it is hard to name a government official with less credibility on Iraq" than Cheney. Not really soul-stirring, but again, the issue is to compare this with what they might have said, with what they were saying, say, two years ago.

And then there was Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE), who told the Council on Foreign Relations on Tuesday that

"[s]uggesting that to challenge or criticize policy is undermining and hurting our troops is not democracy nor what this country has stood for, for over 200 years. ...

Vietnam was a national tragedy partly because Members of Congress failed their country, remained silent and lacked the courage to challenge the Administrations in power until it was too late. Some of us who went through that nightmare have an obligation to the 58,000 Americans who died in Vietnam to not let that happen again. To question your government is not unpatriotic - to not question your government is unpatriotic."

Let's be clear: Hagel is no liberal. What's significant here is that with his eye on the GOPper presidential nod for 2008, Hagel feels free to - even feels it advisable to - put some daylight between himself and the White House on Iraq.

What good all this will lead to, if any, is still an unknown. But the signs are there, the signs of, again, a shift, a shift in awareness, in if you will sensibility. The signs that, yes, people are finally - finally - getting fed up with being lied to and manipulated. Just remember that a wise political tactician will not attack opponents that can be safely ignored because by doing so you draw more attention to them and risk giving them legitimacy in the public eye that they otherwise would not have. So am I disturbed by Shrub and "The Big" lashing out at critics? No way - I'm delighted because it means the criticisms are drawing blood.

One last thing about the protest at Cheney's speech:

About 50 protesters, most of them appearing to be college age, demonstrated outside. Several carried signs, including one that read "Honor Baker, Impeach Cheney."

"College age?" I don't know if that was meant to be merely descriptive or a sly putdown - "ah, just a bunch of kids." Either way, it again carries echoes of Vietnam for me. Could it be? Could it be the naiveté, the passion and idealism, of youth unsullied by the cynical, world-weary "maturity" shown by so many of us, married to political action? If so, I say damn straight!

During the '80s, there was a movie which had a line something like "Once we get out of the '80s, the '90s are going to make the '60s look like the '50s." Obviously, it didn't work out that way. But wouldn't it be cool if the character was just off by 10 years?

Footnote: I suspect that Howard Baker (Yes, there's a connection: Remember it was at a groundbreaking for a center in Baker's honor at which Cheney was speaking.) doesn't deserve the reputation he obtained during the Watergate hearings by his repetitive asking of the question "What did the president know and when did he know it?" I've thought all along that he wasn't trying to advance the investigation but to undermine it.

Since the hearings were about Republican campaign tactics in the 1972 election, trying to focus solely on Richard Nixon was frankly inappropriate. It seemed (and seems) to me that Baker's actual intent was to direct the inquiry away from the obvious criminality of the GOPper mean machine and toward what he thought was safer ground for the party: the question of Nixon's direct personal involvement, for which, early on, there was little evidence. Little did he know....

Footnote to the footnote

If you think it's all about "them," that it doesn't affect "you," think again and read this chilling article from last week's Washington Post about the "exponentially growing" use of so-called "national security letters," or NSLs, to evade and undermine privacy laws and the Fourth Amendment.

Summary: If you have any contact, even casual, even unknowing, with a suspect in any investigation involving "international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities," even if you are not suspected of wrongdoing, any FBI field supervisor can on their own authority, without any oversight by a prosecutor, grand jury, or judge - or even any after-the-fact review by the Justice Department or Congress - issue a national security letter which can be used to demand information on

where a person makes and spends money, with whom he lives and lived before, how much he gambles, what he buys online, what he pawns and borrows, where he travels, how he invests, what he searches for and reads on the Web, and who telephones or e-mails him at home and at work.

Employment records, credit records, banking records, phone records, travel records, and more, it's all there for the taking. The people, agencies, and businesses from who that information is obtained are required to never reveal that the information was released or even that the NSL was presented to them.

Even if you are subsequently cleared of any involvement in anything illegal, the information gathered on you is kept on file permanently in government databanks, which now can also contain consumer data from commercial providers.

In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed. Late last month, President Bush signed Executive Order 13388, expanding access to those files for "state, local and tribal" governments and for "appropriate private sector entities," which are not defined.

The specific purpose of retaining the records is to enhance the government's ability to do "link analysis," otherwise known as "data mining," where your personal information can be examined again and again without the need for a new justification, even for purposes unrelated to the original investigation, and even by an entirely different government agency (or, perhaps, an "appropriate" private corporation).

The defenses of the practice are like entering a hall of mirrors designed by Kafka. For example, Joseph Billy, the FBI's deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, said if agents had to have grounds to suspect someone, they would already know what they wanted an NSL to find out.

"It's all chicken and egg," he said. "We're trying to determine if someone warrants scrutiny or doesn't."

And, of course, the only way to know if someone warrants scrutiny is to scrutinize them. See? Meanwhile, assistant FBI director Michael Mason, in charge of the Washington field office, rings up the old "the innocent have nothing to fear" defense.

"I don't necessarily want somebody knowing what videos I rent or the fact that I like cartoons," said Mason, the Washington field office chief. But if those records "are never used against a person, if they're never used to put him in jail, or deprive him of a vote, et cetera, then what is the argument?"

Former right-wing Georgia Congressman but strong civil liberties advocate Bob Barr says the abuse is in the power itself, which is true, but for my part, I want to have a video of Mason having sex that I can plaster all over the internet. I'm sure he couldn't object. I mean, after all, if privacy itself is not a consideration, if the whole concept of personal privacy is irrelevant, what's the harm? What's the argument?

And no, they didn't forget the all-time classic: Valerie Caproni, the FBI's general counsel, said

"[s]tarting with your bad guy and his telephone number and looking at who he's calling, and [then] who they're calling," the number of people surveilled "goes up exponentially..."

But Caproni said it would not be rational for the bureau to follow the chain too far. "Everybody's connected" if investigators keep tracing calls "far enough away from your targeted bad guy," she said. "What's the point of that?"

And if that's not enough, Billy has words of reassurance.

Innocent Americans, he said, "should take comfort at least knowing that it is done under a great deal of investigative care, oversight, within the parameters of the law."

That's right, you got it, Caproni and Billy are saying "Trust us."

That's kind of hard to do, considering it's mystifying just what sort of "care and oversight" Billy is talking about.

The FBI now issues more than 30,000 national security letters a year, according to government sources, a hundredfold increase over historic norms. ...

The executive branch maintains only statistics, which are incomplete and confined to classified reports. The Bush administration defeated legislation and a lawsuit to require a public accounting....

The Justice Department has offered Congress no concrete information, even in classified form, save for a partial count of the number of letters delivered. The statistics do not cover all forms of national security letters or all U.S. agencies making use of them.

What's more, the White House has been unable to come up with a single case where the use of an NSL disrupted a plot.

As the Justice Department prepared congressional testimony this year, FBI headquarters searched for examples that would show how expanded surveillance powers made a difference. ...

"I'd love to have a made-for-Hollywood story, but I don't have one," Mason said. "I am not even sure such an example exists."

One final Kafkaesque bit is DOJ officials will defend themselves against charges of overbroad (and overboard) authority by noting that Inspector General Glenn Fine has yet to substantiate a complaint of abuse under the Traitor - oops, "Patriot" - Act. But how does one complain about an unjustified search of their personal records if the existence of that search is unknown to them? How do you protest against something you have no idea is happening? In testimony last May, Fine was forced to admit "that's a legitimate question." Going a step further, when the mandate to search is so broad and the required justification so little beyond - if beyond at all - simple curiosity, what would it take to make a search an abuse?

Despite (or perhaps because of) all that, Congress is prepared to actually expand the powers of NSLs by increasing the penalties both for noncompliance and for revealing their contents.

At the FBI, senior officials said the most important check on their power is that Congress is watching.

"People have to depend on their elected representatives to do the job of oversight they were elected to do," Caproni said. "And we think they do a fine job of it."

Yeah, well, you would, wouldn't you.

You guessed it, a Footnote: Opposition is actually growing to various provisions of the Traitor Act. Kind of late in the game but still better late than never and all that, last Wednesday the House instructed its conferees with the Senate on resolving differences between their competing versions of the Act's renewal to accept Senate language requiring a sunset of certain of the more controversial sections. Meanwhile, in a move applauded by the ACLU,

[s]everal major business groups, including the National Association of Manufacturers and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, complained in an Oct. 4 letter to senators that customer records can "too easily be obtained and disseminated" around the government. National security letters, they wrote, have begun to impose an "expensive and time-consuming burden" on business.

Unfortunately, the response has not been to tighten privacy protections, but to offer a concession to business: Both House and Senate versions of the bill would allow a judge to modify a national security letter if it imposes an "unreasonable" or "oppressive" burden on the company that is asked for information. That's obviously intended to placate corporate America and is hardly enough, but it does serve to indicate that it's more than what one FBI official called the "eccentric" civil liberties advocates who are troubled by what the government has been doing - and this is a constituency they can't afford to ignore.

Footnote to all of the preceding, Names in the News Div.

Stephen Hadley. Stephen Hadley. Where else have I heard that name just recently? Oh, yes, I remember, he was the one who just on Sunday refused to rule out the official use of torture,

arguing the war on terror could present a "difficult dilemma" and the US administration was duty-bound to protect the American people. ...

During a trip to Panama earlier this month, President George W. Bush said that Americans "do not torture."

But appearing on CNN's "Late Edition" program, Hadley elaborated on the policy, making clear the White House could envisage circumstances, in which the broad pledge not to torture might not apply.

In other words, we don't torture - unless we do.

It's worth noting in the same speech cited below, Lawrence Wilkerson also said that

officials in the Pentagon and in Cheney's office "really pushed the envelope" on permitting harsh interrogations and treatment of prisoners. Wilkerson recounted how military lawyers who opposed a series of guidelines allowing harsh interrogation techniques were silenced, and how he found out instances of two detainees who died in American facilities in Afghanistan as early as December 2002. The deaths, he said, were only confirmed by the Pentagon earlier this year.

Wilkerson asserted that the US is holding "some 25,000 prisoners and among them maybe 100 real terrorists."

But for the Safety Of Us All and for the protection of the purity and essence of our natural fluids, we dare not limit the president's unlimited authority! Disaster awaits any other course!

Of course, we've already seen where that kind of thinking will lead. I can't imagine why anyone would need a further demonstration - and happily, even the US Senate seems to agree, at least on the matter of torture.

And one more way

People start making odd(er) excuses for you.

In this case, the New York City newspaper The Forward reported on Friday that Lawrence Wilkerson, who had been Colin Powell's chief of staff, told a conference on international humanitarian law earlier in the week that

a White House memo outlining the need for hundreds of thousands of troops for the Iraq invasion was kept from the president. ...

In July 2003, USA Today reported the existence of the NSC memo, which examined the level of troops in peacekeeping operations and concluded that some 500,000 troops would need to be deployed to Iraq. USA Today raised doubts as to whether the president saw the memo. However, Wilkerson's assertion seemed to take the matter a step further, suggesting that aides who supported the war intentionally kept the president in the dark.

Last month, Wilkerson charged Vice President "The Big" Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumplestiltskin with forming a "cabal" to hijack American foreign policy. This time, he fingered then-national security advisor Can'tbe Right or her deputy, Stephen Hadley, as the one who had blocked the memo, although he admitted he had no proof.

So what, are Bush's friends (Wilkerson says he voted for him twice) now resorting to the Ronald Reagan defense? "Others took care of things for him, the poor dear. So don't blame him!"

Another way to know you're in trouble

Your friends start edging away from you.

Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., who is weighing a run for president in 2008, has said "he agrees with Democrats who are pressing the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee to move forward with an investigation into whether the administration manipulated intelligence.

"I was probably the main driver on the Republican side because I thought we needed the answers to whether intelligence was misused, intentionally or unintentionally," Hagel told the Omaha World-Herald in a story published Friday.

Even Rick Santorum, anticipating a tough re-election campaign next year, is trying to put some daylight between himself and the White House.

Santorum said the war has been "less than optimal" and "maybe some blame could be laid" at the White House. "Certainly, mistakes were made," Santorum said.

"Less than optimal?" Still, when a pig flies and all that.

Plus ça change

A number of bloggers, columnists, and other assorted wordy-type people already have variously analyzed, picked apart, and dismissed Shrub's Veteran's Day speech attacking those who criticize his war policies, so there is no need for me to go over that same ground. I did, however, want to provide a little historical perspective of a déjà vu sort, courtesy of two old copies of a right-wing news digest I came across the other day.

On the one hand, we have:

November 11, 2005: George Bush called his congressional critics "deeply irresponsible."

"The stakes in the global war on terror are too high, and the national interest is too important, for politicians to throw out false charges," Bush said. ...

"These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will.

"As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them."

And of course there is the White House gang's continuing opposition to Congressional attempts to put limitations on their "freedom" to conduct the War on Terror^{(c)(reg.)(pat.pend.)} any way they damn well please.

But on the other hand, we have:

June 20, 1970: Spiro Agnew accused eight well-known critics of Nixon's Vietnam War policy of being "apologists" for North Vietnam who favor an American surrender in Southeast Asia. He called Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and J. William Fulbright (D-AR) "Hanoi's most effective - even if unintentional - apologists today." Fulbright, he said, was trying to "forge ... legislative shackles that would deny the president the authority and freedom he needs to protect American troops in the field and to win an honorable and just peace." He called the critics "failures" who "may have developed a psychological addiction to an American defeat."

September 16, 1970: Richard Nixon denounced "mindless destruction and terror" in the US, saying "terrorists" share "not only a contempt for human life but also a contempt for those elemental decencies on which a free society rests." He also attacked those who "excuse or apologize for the terrorists in the streets and on the campuses ... when this happens, the community ... loses its integrity and corrupts its soul."

September 16, 1970: Spiro Agnew assailed those who favor amnesty for Vietnam-era draft resisters. "There is a segment of our society that embraces amnesty as a way of life. This segment is represented far beyond its numbers in the United States Senate. This little band of men is guided by a policy of calculated weakness. They vote to weaken our defenses, they vote to weaken our moral fiber, they vote to weaken the forces of law. They were raised on a book by Dr. Spock, and a paralyzing permissive philosophy pervades every policy they espouse."

September 17, 1970: Attorney General John Mitchell declared that various US-based groups are "working on a national basis" to carry out terrorist acts in cities and on campuses.

September 17, 1970: Rep. William Cramer (R-FL) introduced a bill to make killing a police officer a capital offense under federal law, claiming attacks on police are "part of a nationwide plan by the radical revolutionaries, aimed at the ultimate overthrow of our government."

By the way, the same issues of the magazine also referred to Cesar Chavez as a "pro-communist agitator," called the New York Times "one of the best propaganda outlets the communists have in the United States," and labeled Ken Gibson, newly-elected as the first black mayor of a major northeastern city (Newark, NJ), "the 'moderate' front man for the radical Left."

So yes, my friends, we have been through this before. The "terrorist threat." The "don't tie the president's hands" argument. The "defeatists" in their "weakness" sending "wrong signals" in the face of an enemy out to "destroy our way of life." We've heard it all before and in some cases, rather more eloquently. But experience shows that when these sorts of claims are made, when the accusations against even establishment figures escalate, it's because the forces in power are in trouble: They are losing - or have already lost - the argument, and they know it.

That is to minimize neither the urgency nor the dangers of the present moment, but only to provide a bit of energy, a bit of inspiration, to carry on. Because:

November, 1970: William Cramer tries to move from the House to the Senate in a campaign in which he "had the entire Nixon administration stumping for him." He lost to Lawton Chiles.

October 10, 1973: Spiro Agnew resigns after pleading nolo contendere to charges of tax fraud.

August 9, 1974: Richard Nixon resigns after it becomes clear he will be impeached for obstruction of justice in the Watergate scandal.

February 21, 1975: John Mitchell is convicted of conspiracy, obstruction of justice, and perjury for his role in the Watergate break-in and cover-up; he is sentenced to two and a-half to eight years in prison.

Carry it on.

Well, I'll be!

"Every victory brings another...."

The House of Representatives has been debating a so-called "deficit reduction" bill that proposes cuts across a variety of social programs - including Food Stamps, Medicaid, child support enforcement, and more - to the tune of a total of $54 billion over the decade. It looked for a time like another wingnut juggernaut.

But believe it or not, a group of at least titular moderate Republicans forced the House leadership to drop from the plan a provision to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska to oil drilling, AP reported late Wednesday. The GOPper miniführers

also dropped from the budget document plans to allow states to authorize oil and gas drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts - regions currently under a drilling moratorium.

The actions were a stunning setback for those who have tried for years to open a coastal strip of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or ANWR, to oil development, and a victory for environmentalists, who have lobbied hard against the drilling provisions.

A group of 25 House Republicans sent a letter to GOPper leaders wanting the provision stripped from the bill and saying that they could not vote for the budget if it wasn't. Given the narrow GOPper hold on the House and the overwhelming Dummycrat opposition to the measure because of the deep cuts it makes in social programs, Hastert and company knew they couldn't afford those defections.

So they dropped the provisions. And oh my Undefined Intelligent Designer of Life, the Universe, and Everything, what do you know? They still can't get the votes they need! So says the Washington Post for Friday:

House Republican leaders were forced to abruptly pull their $54 billion budget-cutting bill off the House floor yesterday, amid growing dissension in Republican ranks over spending priorities, taxes, oil exploration and the reach of government.

A battle between House Republican conservatives and moderates over energy policy and federal anti-poverty and education programs left GOP leaders without enough votes to pass a budget measure they had framed as one of the most important pieces of legislation in years. ...

The House budget vote was supposed to reestablish the Republican commitment to a smaller government that would change the federal approach to Medicaid, food stamps, agriculture subsidies, student loans and a host of other programs.

But moderate Republicans made it clear that was not the way they wanted the party defined. ... [P]olicy changes were hitting the nation's most vulnerable citizens just as the party was preparing another round of tax cuts that would benefit the most affluent.

That is, another round of gutting the poor to fatten the rich - and some GOPpers are starting to feel the political winds shifting to the point where that is no longer a platform on which they wish to run.

Another attempt to pass the bleed-the-poor bill will be made next week. But, the Post says, "lawmakers conceded it will not get any easier" as GOPper "moderates" (wingnuts with some grip on reality) square off against GOPper "conservatives" (wingnuts, minus the grip).

Don't get too excited; this is yet an uphill battle and the real argument, even among the Dims, remains not whether to cut (much less whether to increase) but only how much to cut. Still, it is a hopeful sign that we might be nearer the crest of that hill than we thought a few days ago. As for ANWR, well, that too is still under threat: Senate conferees are supposedly determined to get the region opened up and may be thinking this will be their best chance for some time. The chances of keeping Big Oil's greedy mitts off ANWR remain not good, but they're better than they were.

Footnote: The Post also said that

the Senate Finance Committee broke up in disarray yesterday morning after failing to secure support for a tax package that would have extended the president's 2003 cut to the tax rates on dividends and capital gains. Joining the panel's Democrats, Sen. Olympia J. Snowe (R-Maine) declared she could not support a tax cut that primarily benefited the rich as Congress was trying to cut programs for the poor. But when the panel's chairman, Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), tried to win approval of a tax package without the investment tax cuts, panel conservatives refused to go along.

This despite the fact that

Bush's call to make his first-term tax cuts permanent has had so little support that Grassley drafted a bill that would simply extend some of the Bush tax cuts for a single year. Even that may go nowhere.

It seems the real wingers are sticking to their "More, more, I'm still not satisfied!" way of thinking. Considering that in the past, what has usually brought down reactionary regimes of one sort or another has been the tendency to overreach, I say, good.

One bit of bad news before it gets too far away

The White House is again trying to manipulate the rules for coal-fired power plants to let them keep spewing pollution, revealed a Reuters article in mid-October.

What's involved are the "new source review" regulations under the Clean Air Act. When the Act was first passed, existing plants were grandfathered in under the assumption that over time they'd be replaced with new plants. But to avoid the expense of pollution control equipment, utilities kept expanding existing power plants instead of replacing them. To close this loophole, Congress imposed the new source review, under which any significant change to or expansion of an existing plant was to be regarded as if it were new construction, subject to pollution control laws. The Bush administration, not for the first time, is trying to re-open the loophole by fiddling with the regulations. What it wants to do now is to change the way that utilities calculate their emissions, which

would allow existing plants to emit more pollutants without triggering federal emission-reduction requirements, environmentalists said. ...

Environmental groups said the EPA's plan, if finalized, means U.S. utilities can spew more nitrogen oxides and sulfur dioxide - precursors of acid rain and smog linked to respiratory diseases like asthma.

"Under the new rule, emissions can increase entirely without limit, as long as a facility's hourly efficiency rate increases," the National Environmental Trust said.

The EPA maintains that the changes, which the White House failed to get into an energy bill passed earlier in the month, are all about efficiency and clean air and good health and ice cream for everyone. However,

[i]n internal EPA memos distributed by environmental groups, an EPA enforcement official said the proposed rule is "largely unenforceable as written."

"The effect of the rule is to make very few, if any, changes modifications that trigger NSR," according to the memo, provided by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Which is exactly the point.

The action came just about two weeks after a new report said

[t]he health risks associated with air pollution may be nearly three times greater than previously thought....

Researchers say earlier studies may have seriously underestimated air pollution's health risks by basing their calculations on one or two air pollution measures from several cities and then comparing the health effects.

That is, previous researchers have compared the average air pollution over one entire city to that over another entire city without taking into account the fact that levels of air pollution can vary considerably within a city. Instead, this study looked at 23 sites in Los Angeles over a period of two decades.

The results of this in-depth analysis show that the risk of death from any cause rose by 11% to 17% for each increase in the level of fine particles found in vehicle exhaust, smoke, and industrial emissions in the neighborhood's air.

"By looking at the effects of pollution within communities, not only did we observe pollution's influence on overall mortality, but we saw specific links between particulate matter and death from ischemic heart disease, such as heart attack, as well as lung cancers," says researcher Michael Jarrett, PhD, associate professor of preventive medicine at the University of Southern California, in a news release.

One thing the researchers say needs to be examined is whether the type of air pollution found around L.A., which is "strongly influenced" by vehicle exhaust, is more dangerous than that found in the eastern US, where dirty air is more the result of power plants and factory emissions.

By the way, in case you hadn't guessed, among the most damaging types of air pollution, because the small size of the particulates involved allows them to penetrate deeper into the lungs, comes from burning fossil fuels - such as coal.

One bit of good news before it gets too far away

Just over two weeks ago, AP reported that the Shrub team has abandoned research into a nuclear "bunker-buster" warhead. Known as the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, it was designed to burrow into the ground before exploding, putting what are known as "hard targets" - missile silos, reinforced bunkers, and the like - at risk.

Congress had been cool to the idea, to the extent that the House blocked funding and the Senate approved only a scaled-back request of $4 million for initial research. Now the White House has given up on it.

"This is a true victory for a more rational nuclear policy," said Stephen Young, a senior analyst for the Union of Concerned Scientists, a nuclear nonproliferation advocacy group. "The proposed weapon, more than 70 times the size of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, would have caused unparalleled collateral damage."

But of course, these days no bit of good news can go untainted: The Shrub gang hasn't given up on the idea, just on using nukes to do it.

"The focus will now be with the Defense Department and its research into earth-penetrating technology using conventional weaponry," [Sen. Pete] Domenici [R-NM] said in a statement. The nuclear security administration "indicated that this research should evolve around more conventional weapons, rather than tactical nuclear devices," the senator said.

The Shrub gang insists that this is a vital, absolutely necessary weapon in the War On Terrorism^{(c)(reg.)(pat.pend.)} - a classic case of old wine in new bottles: The idea for the weapon was originally broached in the context of a nuclear targeting strategy called "decapitation" which aimed to "win" a nuclear war by destroying an enemy's C³I, it's "Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence."

And in fact its usefulness against tunnels and such used by irregular forces is limited at best and its potential as a first-strike weapon in a major conflict much greater: Even as a "conventional" weapon, an RNEP by definition threatens hardened targets, and sites such as missile silos and command centers of a national adversary, precisely because they are fixed and used long-term, are much easier to pinpoint and thus more vulnerable than the ad hoc contrivances of terrorist groups.

9/11 didn't "change everything." It just changed the arguments.

Say what?

Reuters says that Pat Robertson has warned the people of Dover, Pennsylvania that they shouldn't be surprised if disaster strikes because they had "rejected" God by voting out the school board that tried to push so-called Intelligent Design into the curriculum.

People really give money to this guy?

Doctor Who and the Ambassadors of Geek

Astronomers believe that at the heart of probably every active galaxy (i.e., one in which star formation is occurring) lies a supermassive black hole. And now, New Scientist reported last week,

[a]stronomers have obtained the closest glimpse yet of the supermassive black hole thought to lurk at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way. ...

Zhi-Qiang Shen of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China and colleagues in the US examined the radio source at the centre of our galaxy, known as Sagittarius A. They used a network of 10 radio telescopes spanning 5000 miles, known as the Very Large Baseline Array (VLBA). The radio source is thought to mark the location of a titanic black hole that is guzzling surrounding light and matter.

The radio emissions are thought to come from highly energised gas closely orbiting the black hole, rather than the black hole itself. The team studied an area 12 times bigger than the central black hole. ...

If astronomers are able to see up to the edge of the black hole's event horizon - beyond which no light can escape - they may be able to determine whether Einstein's theory of general relativity holds up under high gravity conditions.

If it does, astronomers expect to see a dark shadow due to the black hole completely absorbing emissions from behind the black hole. Then a brighter ring should be seen around the shadow due to light rays that are flung around the black hole. However, this is a discovery that may yet be five to 10 years away.

"It could be we see nothing of the sort and we find something completely different," says Christopher Reynolds, an astrophysicist at the University of Maryland, College Park, US. "We might have to confront the notion that Einstein's theory was inappropriate."

And despite what the pseudo-scientific know-nothings would have you believe, the prospect of coming across something unexpected - coming up against something new - delights true scientists.

A few election notes

- Democrats won gubernatorial elections in Virginia and New Jersey. :yawn: Both were expected to win and both were ahead in the polls pretty consistently and in the case of Jon Corzine (New Jersey), pretty far ahead for the most part. The only interesting things were that Bush's last-minute appearance in Virginia certainly didn't help GOPper Jerry Kilgore, who lost to Dim Tim Kaine by a margin clearly bigger than the polls indicated, and that in New Jersey the GOPpers reached what might be a new low in campaign ads, showing Corzine's ex-wife saying he let his family down and would probably let New Jersey down.

- Arnold lost big. All four of the propositions he championed in California went down. Someone - I don't recall who just now - recently commented that the Gropinator had campaigned for office saying the state was a mess and it was all the state government's fault and since getting into office he's been saying the state's a mess and it's all everyone else's fault. It seems that at least some people in California are thinking that it's the governor's fault.

- Not surprisingly, by a hefty margin Texas voters endorsed a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage. Human rights supporters were disappointed by the results, but they could hardly say they were surprised by much of anything in Texas. (See Ivins, Molly.)

- On the other hand, voters in Maine clearly rejected an attempt to undo the ban on discrimination against gays and lesbians

approved by lawmakers earlier this year. The lawmakers expanded the state's human rights act to outlaw discrimination based on sexual orientation, a step already taken by the five other New England states.

In near-complete returns, about 55 percent of voters were opposing repeal of the new law, which is broadly worded to protect transsexuals and transvestites as well as gays and lesbians.

As the folks at The Next Hurrah pointed out, this was proof that despite wingnut claims to the contrary, human rights can win at the ballot box.

- You may have heard about all of those, certainly the first three, but what you may not have heard is that in Dover, Pennsylvania,

[v]oters came down hard Tuesday on school board members who backed a statement on intelligent design being read in biology class, ousting eight Republicans and replacing them with Democrats who want the concept stripped from the science curriculum.

As I predicted just the other day, supporters of the slate of challengers apparently included both those who oppose ID and support actual science and those who just wish the whole business would go away.

The new board is to take office on December 5; it will be interesting to see if in the interim the lame-duck board will petition the judge in the suit over the policy to either declare a mistrial (if he can do that after all the testimony is in) or to decline to issue a verdict on the grounds that with the change in the board and the declared intention of the incoming members to strip ID from the curriculum, the issue is now moot - thus avoiding the possibility of a further embarrassing defeat.

Interestingly, the new board seems in no major rush to undo the ID policy, saying they'll "consider" the judge's decision, which is expected in January. That seems to me to indicate at least a fair degree of confidence in the outcome.

Footnote: It's not election news, but it did happen on election day and is relevant to what was just mentioned:

Revisiting a topic that exposed Kansas to nationwide ridicule six years ago, the state Board of Education approved science standards for public schools Tuesday that cast doubt on the theory of evolution[, AP reported on Tuesday].

The 6-4 vote was a victory for intelligent design advocates who helped draft the standards.

Not only do the standards now falsely claim that evolution has been "challenged in recent years by fossil evidence and molecular biology," the board also - get this, now - rewrote the definition of science, so that "it is no longer limited to the search for natural explanations of phenomena."

The vote was not a surprise, especially in the wake of the kangaroo court the board majority staged to justify their pre-determined conclusion, a practice entirely in keeping with the entire ID project.

"This is a sad day. We're becoming a laughingstock of not only the nation, but of the world, and I hate that," said board member Janet Waugh, a Democrat.

You'll pardon the expression, but amen to that, Ms. Waugh.

Just for good measure, a footnote to the preceding

Speaking of yellowcake, it appears Bush is becoming radioactive. Even Silvio Berlusconi is backing away slowly, or so this from USA Today would indicate:

Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, one of President Bush's strongest supporters over Iraq, says he tried repeatedly to dissuade the American leader from going to war and was never convinced military force was the best way to bring democracy. ...

"I believed that military action should have been avoided," he was quoted as saying. ...

Recently, an initial contingent of 300 soldiers returned home and Berlusconi has said subsequent groups of 300 would come back until the final group of 1,000 returns together.

This was just a couple of days before the head of Italy's intelligence services emphatically

denied that SISMI, Italy's secret service, "ever had a role in the dossier that was supposed to have demonstrated that Iraq was in an advanced phase of possession of enriched uranium,"

according to Enzo Bianco, who chairs an oversight committee on secret services. The committee was reportedly also told that when the IAEA inquired about the documents in January 2003, it was told "those documents didn't come from SISMI, they weren't produced nor supplied by SISMI."

Now, there may well be a lot of CYA going on there, especially since even Italian intelligence fingers a "former SISMI collaborator" as the forger, but that doesn't alter the fact that the Italian government is clearly taking steps to disassociate itself from Bush's War.

Now tell the truth

Are you really surprised by this?

[T]op Republicans in Congress called for a joint House of Representatives-Senate probe on whether classified material was leaked and national security damaged,

Reuters reported on Tuesday. The call was prompted by a Washington Post story last week laying out that

[t]he CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents. ...

Virtually nothing is known about who is kept in the facilities, what interrogation methods are employed with them, or how decisions are made about whether they should be detained or for how long.

According to Reuters,

Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist of Tennessee and House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert of Illinois in a letter asked the intelligence committees to determine if the information given to the newspaper was classified and accurate, who leaked it and under what authority, and the actual and potential national security damage from it.

These are the very same people who tried to block an investigation into 9/11, who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into even a tepid whitewash investigation of prewar intelligence, who even now are stalling on their own promised investigation of the use of that intelligence by the Shrub gang (the so-called "Phase II"), and who couldn't have cared less about the outing of Valerie Plame. The very same people who seem to be utterly uncurious as to how it came to be that the US and UK intelligence services both were supposedly fooled by an obvious, clumsy, forgery into claiming "credible" evidence that Saddam Hussein had tried to get yellowcake from Niger. The very same people who apparently are totally uninterested in the fact that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi,

[a] high Qaeda official in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, "was intentionally misleading the debriefers" in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda's work with illicit weapons.

The same people. The same people who are now all hot and heavy to discover just who did the dastardly deed of telling the truth about the US government disappearing people into a secret prison system. Like I said, are you surprised?

Asked whether the Republican leaders would seek an investigation of the secret prisons, Ron Bonjean, Hastert's spokesman, said, "First we're looking into why we have people leaking classified information."

Ah. I guess investigating the prisons will be Phase II.

Footnote: The link to the Niger documents came by way of Left End of the Dial.

Another Footnote: Someday I should lay out in detail my feelings about the Valerie Plame case. 'Cause, ya see, I'm not particularly upset by the outing of an agent per se. It would depend more on what they had been doing and who they were doing it with. Most of what the CIA does is intelligence-gathering and analysis, and much of that doesn't even involve what would usually be considered spying but rather combing through open-source material. It's that minority of the agency's work that involves covert action, of actually trying to manipulate events and people, which I reject.

The secret prison system described by the Post certainly fits in that latter category. The person who leaked that information should not be hunted, they should be celebrated as a hero.

Footnote to the Footnote: Frist and Hastert's probe may get short-circuited before it begins. According to Raw Story,

Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) told CNN's Ed Henry Tuesday afternoon that he believed it was a Republican senator who gave information about secret CIA jails abroad to the Washington Post....

Lott said that much of the information contained in the Post report ... was discussed at a meeting of Republican senators last Tuesday.

So let's see how quickly Billy and Denny backtrack. Five... Four... Three...

Interesting comment

Kenneth Tomlinson, who after becoming the chair of the board of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting spent public money to have outside researchers check public programming for "liberal bias," has resigned, it was announced last Friday. The resignation came before CPB Inspector General Kenneth Konz, who has been looking into Tomlinson's reign, could release his report.

Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy noted cogently that this is unlikely to stop the continuing attempts to turn public broadcasting into another mouthpiece of the right (in fact, I suspect the whole resignation is an exercise in misdirection). Despite that, it's still a victory and still does mean, as was discovered earlier in the drive to relax media concentration rules, even for the Shrubberies^* there are limits beyond which they can't go.

Oh, what was the "interesting comment?" It was this:

The CPB said both the board and Tomlinson believed it was in the best interest of the CPB that he step down.

"The board does not believe that Mr. Tomlinson acted maliciously or with any intent to harm CPB or public broadcasting, and the board recognizes the Mr. Tomlinson strongly disputes the findings in the soon-to-be-released inspector general's report," the board said in a statement.

Which I'd say gives us a pretty good hint as to what Konz's report is going to say.

^*Shrubberies: Acolytes of Shrub

Train wrecked

Amtrak's board of directors has fired President David Gunn. Gunn, while not a great favorite among rail advocates, had been successful in cutting costs and improving management on Amtrak and maintaining service on long-distance lines that the board wants to kill - eagerly pushed by jackasses such as Transportation Secretary (and Amtrak board member) Norman Mineta, whose repeated lies and fables about Amtrak would shame Baron von Munchhausen.

In fact, the board, backed by the Shrub gang, wants to shut down all long-distance lines and turn Amtrak into little more than a series of disconnected transportation hubs, useful primarily for ferrying business executives between cities that are too close for convenient air travel. In September, it even

approved a resolution authorizing splitting off the Northeast Corridor, which accounts for the largest share of the railroad's ridership.

That would destroy Amtrak and the board knows it. Gunn was not willing to destroy the system, so despite his aggressive cost-cutting, he's out.

Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who has fought against a Bush administration effort to end subsidies for the struggling passenger rail service, praised Gunn as "a brilliant manager."

The senator called Gunn's removal "a crushing blow to Amtrak's hopes for success and reform."

The praise is certainly overdone, but Schumer's underlying point that there is a conscious, on-going attempt to destroy long-distance passenger rail service in this country, a service which was never intended to succeed, is absolutely unquestionable.

Too good not to share

Via PastPeak comes this from Jay Leno:

President Bush was asked how he came up with a conservative like Alito, and he said he got the idea over the weekend while turning the clocks back.

If John Roberts as a nominee represented the bob-and-weave style and Harriet Miers was the "also on the card" entry with no footwork and the glass jaw, Samuel Alito appears to be the plodder who intends to win just by never going down.

I mean, this guy, with his record, he's not even a moving target. He's an out-front right-wing ideologue who questions church-state separation, opposes abortion rights, and doesn't give two hoots about his own conflicts of interest or even keeping the very specific promises he made to the Senate during his confirmation to his current position.

Trying to excuse him, the wingnuts, who waxed ecstatic about his nomination to SCOTUS, insisted that he "follows precedent." Well, BFD for the most part; appellate-level justices are supposed to follow Supreme Court precedents. But what struck me more than anything else about his opinions as noted above and what I think is very revealing, is that he looked to apply the most reactionary interpretation of precedent available. That is, he would "follow precedent," but to the degree precedent allowed, he would seek to limit civil rights laws, increase police powers, stifle the rights of workers, block access to the courts by victims of bigotry and discrimination, and on and on.

What does that say about what he will do on the Supreme Court, where precedent is a guide but is not binding?

Not surprisingly, there is talk of a filibuster and already the wingnuts are raising the specter of the "nuclear option" that would essentially ban filibusters of judicial nominees. Yeah, but what about the so-called "gang of 14" with their oh-so-Solomon-like balancing act to head off that possibility?

Two Republican members of the group, Senators Mike DeWine of Ohio and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, have said that if Democrats stage a filibuster against Judge Alito's confirmation, they would support a rule change.

I have to say it: I told you so. I told you so in May, when the deal was first announced.

It ... would be entirely in keeping with the letter of the deal for the GOPpers to at any useful point in the future to say of a Dem attempt at a filibuster, "This is not an extraordinary circumstance! The deal's off!" With Frist saying the nuclear option is still on the table and that he "will monitor this agreement closely," that is by no means an idle concern.

I told you so again in July, when I said

GOPpers are already making noises that there had better be no filibustering of whatever wingnut sock puppet Shrub puts up for the Supreme Court. In fact, there really shouldn't be any questions asked at all.

I also quoted Orrin Hatch (R-Uh-oh) as saying that he couldn't see "any circumstances where a filibuster would be appropriate."

The brutal fact is, enough GOPpers are going to do as they're told to get this creepy jackass on the Supreme Court no matter what he believes or says or does as long as he's copacetic with the most reactionary elements of their party. So filibuster him, dammit! At this point, what have we got to lose? If Frist wants to detonate the bomb and blow a hole in 200 years of Senate tradition, tell him to go ahead and do it! In fact, dare him to. Would we be any worse off?

And is anyone so damn sure he'd actually do it? Last spring he kept threatening it but kept putting it off and I frankly wondered - and still wonder - if he ever actually had the votes. I noted at the time that certainly most GOPpers would go along; the question was if enough would. I frankly can't imagine that too many of them would be really enthusiastic about supporting a move of which, according to polls (if I recall correctly), most Americans disapproved and facing an opponent who might - if they were smart and while it's hard to believe, some Dems actually are - hammer away at their "disrespect for the traditions of our way of government."

Bottom line here is that Samuel Alito is even worse that John Roberts. Roberts is a conservative in the mold of Rehnquist: Hard right-wing but not completely without nuance. Alito is a conservative in the mold of Scalia (thus the nickname "Scalito," or "little Scalia"): Rigid, undeviating reactionary. We may not be able to stop him - but we will stand in disgrace if we don't do our damnedest.

A little good news to lighten the load

The Kansas City Star reported on October 22 that in 2000, an 18-year old boy named Matthew Limon, residing in the advanced state of Kansas, had consensual sex with another boy, then aged 14. The act was discovered; he was arrested, tried, and convicted of criminal sodomy. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

If 17 years in the slammer for teen sex isn't shocking enough, consider that had his partner been a girl instead of a boy, the maximum sentence would have been just 15 months. That's because Kansas has a so-called Romeo and Juliet statute, which

allows for lesser penalties for teenagers convicted of having sexual relations with a 14- or 15-year-old, so long as the offender is 18 or younger and less than four years older than the victim, and is a member of the opposite sex.

Limon's attorneys argued that the last distinction violates the state and federal constitutions by holding out different penalties for a separate class of citizens.

The good news here is that on October 21, the Kansas Supreme Court agreed, ruling not only that the law is unfair but that

[t]he statute violated a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that made it illegal for states to penalize homosexual activity.

Everyone on both sides agreed the ruling is a victory for gay rights and its strong language - the Court declared that "moral disapproval of a group cannot be a legitimate governmental interest" - could be the basis for further gains. Still, the history of the case shows not only how far we've come but how far we haven't:

Lower courts had ruled against Limon, arguing the distinction was necessary to protect traditional sexuality, to protect children and teenagers and to prevent the spread of diseases such as HIV. They had also ruled that softer penalties for straight offenders were justified because those offenders might have impregnated their young partners and have a child to care for.

"Protect traditional sexuality?" Isn't that the same kind of argument that was used for years to claim that it was impossible for men to rape their wives? To criminalize anal and oral sex, even between married couples? To ban birth control?

"Protect children and teenagers?" From what? From learning that the notion that gays are more likely to exploit children or be predators is a bigoted fantasy?

"Prevent the spread of diseases such as HIV?" Are they still living in the old ignorance that HIV is a "gay disease?" Do they not care about syphilis, gonorrhea, genital herpes? Is it okay for those diseases to spread?

"Straight offenders ... might have ... a child to care for?" Do you really want some 17-year old supporting the child of a 15-year old? Is that wise or in most cases even possible? Aren't you really proposing rewarding the boy for impregnating the girl? ("Atta guy! Way to go!") And isn't the "logic" the same sort as that once used to justify paying men more than women for the same job? ("He has a family to care for.")

And, of course, there was the typical slogan-smeared soundbites about "activist judges" from the friends of bigotry:

I'm outraged," said Matt Staver of the Orlando, Fla.-based Liberty Counsel, which filed a brief supporting the law on behalf of 25 Kansas lawmakers. "The court essentially rewrote the law and clearly usurped the power of the Legislature."

Let me explain something to all the Matt Stavers out there. I'll try to say it clearly and simply enough so your limited grasp of reality can encompass it.

The Legislature does not have the power to override the rock-bottom principle of equal treatment before the law! The Legislature does not have the power to override the US Constitution! The Court did not "usurp" any power of the Legislature because the Legislature does not have the power to establish lawful bigotry.

Is that simple enough for you?

Oily customers

Prompted by Exxon-Mobil posting the largest quarterly profits of any US corporation ever - some $10 billion - amid rising gasoline and heating oil prices, Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has said that the Senate Energy and Commerce committees will hold hearings into charges of price-gouging by major oil companies, Agence France-Presse reported last week.

"I have asked them to call as witnesses executives from the major oil companies and representatives of the state attorneys general, who have the initial responsibility of keeping the behavior of local energy providers on the straight and narrow," Frist said. ...

"Ultimately, if the facts warrant it, I will support a federal anti-gouging law," he said.

Somehow, I don't think the oil giants are trembling in fear of any investigation set up by Bill Frist. For one thing, Frist supports drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) and kept a provision in the omnibus budget bill to allow it. Next, as per usual, his move was intended as a way to deflect stronger demands and stronger words. For example, Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said

"All of the major oil companies, foreign and domestic, have now announced their earnings: ExxonMobil third-quarter earnings up 75 percent. ConocoPhilips up 89 percent. British Petroleum up 34 percent. Shell up 68 percent.

"All together, the 29 major oil and gas firms in the Standard and Poors 500 stock index are expected to earn 96 billion dollars this year - up from 68 billion dollars last year and 43 billion dollars in 2003.

"Its become perfectly clear that the big oil companies are cashing in while average American families are being bled dry," Schumer said.

But beyond that, how many times have we been down this road? How many times have energy prices gone up and up until people got so pissed off that some in Congress started mumbling about investigations - at which time prices dropped a bit until the pressure was off?

And how many times have whatever investigations did get going end up by swallowing industry propaganda about "market forces" and "competitiveness" and going no further than a few tut-tuts about "taking advantage of market conditions" to engage in "overaggressive pricing?" (That's as close to an actual quote from one such inquiry some years ago as memory will allow.) Even Schumer, despite his seemingly tough talk, has only proposed a two-year "excess profits" tax to be split between Katrina relief and deficit reduction. No offense, Chuck, but big whoop.

You want to impress me? Stop with the crap of bogus "investigations" that lead nowhere, skip the flaccid bull about "excess profits taxes," and openly avow that energy supplies are a vital national resource that must be regulated in the public interest.

We have an energy-intensive economy, in fact an energy-intensive culture. Our heat, our light, our transportation, our industry, our food supply, our jobs, all are based on energy consumption. Yes, we waste an awful lot of energy, yes, we could do more with less, yes, we could live simpler lives, yes, we could and should be doing one hell of a lot more with conservation and renewables - but no, none of that is relevant to the issue immediately at hand. That issue is the central importance of energy - no matter how environmentally-sound and efficient its production and consumption - to the way we live our lives.

You really want to impress me? Argue that the mineral and energy resources of a nation are the common property of all its people and can't properly be controlled or exploited for private profit. Oh, Exxon-Mobil, oh, Conoco, oh all the rest, yes, we'll license you to extract, refine, and sell those resources, but you'll pay a nice fee for doing so - because you don't own it until you buy it from the people as a whole: Until it's actually out of the ground, it belongs to us.

You really, really want to impress me? Breathe the N-word: nationalization.

Footnote: Ted Kennedy and some other Dem senators

on Thursday sent an open letter to oil company executives urging them to use their increased profits to contribute to fuel funds for low-income families.

Unless those executives get visited by three spirits on Christmas Eve, I don't see that happening.

Creating a theory

As I'm sure you recall, the school board of Dover, Pennsylvania issued a ruling in November, 2004 requiring high school biology teachers to read to their students a statement questioning evolution and encouraging them to read a book generally regarded as the major statement of so-called "Intelligent Design." I expect you also remember that a group of 11 parents who were interested in having their children be educated in the 21^st century instead of the 18^th sued, arguing that the board was illegally and unconstitutionally trying to inject religion into public education.

That trial is expected to wrap up today, November 4. Although it's never wise to predict with authority the outcome of a trial, two bits of testimony reported by New Scientist magazine should be sufficient to show just how bogus the whole ID project is.

Early in October, it was revealed that earlier drafts of the very book the board cited, Of Pandas and People, repeatedly referred to "creationism" and "creationists." But just after the US Supreme Court ruled on June 19, 1987 that creationism is religion and therefore not to be taught in public schools, those references were replaced with "intelligent design" and "intelligent design proponent."

"ID proponents have said for years that they are not creationists," says Nick Matzke of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California.... "This proves beyond a doubt that this is simply a new name for creationism." ...

The names of the drafts alone are incriminating, he says. The first draft, in 1983, was called Creation Biology, the next is Biology and Creation, dated 1986, and is followed by Biology and Origin in 1987. It is not until later in 1987 that Of Pandas and People emerges.

Perhaps worse for the neo-creationists, two weeks later their standard-bearer, the aggressive and highly-visible biochemist and ID proponent Michael Behe, who insists that ID is a valid scientific theory, was forced to admit under cross-examination that ID is not "well-substantiated." Even worse than that, he acknowledged that he was actually using his own definition of a scientific theory, one so vague that under it, he admitted, astrology would also be considered valid science.

The exchange prompted laughter from the court, which was packed with local members of the public and the school board.

That kind of response can't be a good sign for the school board and its ilk - and frankly, one unlikely to be overlooked by the court to the degree that considerations go beyond points of constitutional law and into public opinion.

The judge in the nonjury trial has given no indication of when a decision will come.

Footnote: School board elections are coming up in Dover on Tuesday. An opposition slate is running on a platform of taking ID out of the schools. They expect to draw support not only from those who know better than to accept ID but also from others who, whatever they think about it, wish the whole business will just go away.

Ha?

From The Independent (UK) for last Friday comes news that

[t]he Bush White House is not only losing the battle for the hearts and minds of the American people. It also appears to be losing its sense of humour.

The administration has just written a cease-and-desist letter to the satirical newspaper The Onion, urging it to stop using the presidential seal on its website.

Of course, the seal has been used in parody and satire any number of times, but in this case the White House is saying that the seal

"is not to be used in connection with commercial ventures or products in any way that suggests presidential support or endorsement."

The Shrub team is endorsing The Onion? Even by implication? Have they actually read the thing?

So I think The Independent is wrong: I don't think the White House has lost its sense of humor. I think they're just so desperate to find a new source of support somewhere that they'll take anything they can find - or think they find.

Now, this is a shock

This item is from over a month ago, from an October 1 AP story, in fact, but I thought it important enough to bring up even after this extended time.

Phoenix - Taser International Inc. has voluntarily changed some of its broad safety claims and limited its use of the word "non-lethal" in an effort to appease Arizona officials concerned about possibly misleading marketing, officials said Wednesday.

The move by the nation's largest maker of stun guns comes as the Securities and Exchange Commission investigates the company and as the Arizona Attorney General's Office conducts its own inquiry into safety claims. ...

In January, Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard said his office was probing claims Taser has made about safety studies on its products.

The "company officials," it seems, must have been employing some new meaning of the word "voluntarily" of which I've previously been unaware. But to continue:

According to Taser and the Attorney General's Office, the stun gun maker submitted a list of language changes the company has already made, including an 18-point "product warning."

Among the changes, Taser explains that it uses the term non-lethal as defined by the Department of Defense - which doesn't mean the weapon can't cause death, but that it's not intended to be fatal.

Other changes include substituting the phrase "leave no lasting after effects" to "are more effective and safer than other use-of-force options." ...

Amnesty International has compiled a list of more than 100 people the group says have died after being shocked in scuffles with lawmen.

Taser maintains that no deaths have been directly caused by the weapon alone.

That last statement is significant because it is a major step-down for the company, which previously insisted the weapon was innocent in all such cases. This statement, however, admits both that it could be an indirect cause of death and that it could be a direct contributing factor.

Meanwhile, the SEC is

conducting an expanded official investigation of claims Taser has made about safety studies; an end-of-year sale analysts have questioned because it appeared to inflate sales to meet annual projections; and the possibility that outsiders acquired internal company information to manipulate the stock price.

I've said all along about Tasers that they are dangerous weapons. In some ways they are more dangerous than guns in police hands. Not because they are inherently more deadly - they are not - but precisely because their supposed safety would lead them to be used almost casually, as a convenience, a method of enforcing dominance without effort, employed not only in situations where potentially deadly force would otherwise be used, but even in cases where little or no force would otherwise be used. Which is exactly what has happened.

As far as I'm concerned, the suckers should be banned and the sooner Taser Inc. is run to ground, the better.

Three... Two... One...

To those of you who have stuck with me during this long dry spell, my many and sincere thanks. I hope things are finally settling down a little and I'll be able to spend more time at this.

Over the next day or two or three, I'm going to post a few things that struck me during my time away. Some are maybe a little old now - a couple of weeks, even - but I thought them worth noting. Consider it a way of catching up.

Again, thanks for being around.