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The first officially sanctioned Western tour group since 2003 is visiting Iraq in the latest sign of improved security.
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The tour was arranged by a British organization and included stops in the semiautonomous Kurdish region and the ancient ruins of Babylon and Ur.
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Several observers think Cheney may be starting to feel the heat from Democrats' efforts to investigate the Bush Administration's counterterrorism policies - policies Cheney advocated, and for which his proteges allegedly provided the legal basis. But if he was trying to deflect attention from Bush-era policies, Cheney's aggression will likely have the opposite effect. "If his goal was to tamp down talk of a truth commission, he has probably exacerbated the problem," a veteran Republican told TIME.
Cheney avoids mentioning all the human suffering he has caused, on a cosmic scale, and focuses on procedural matters like elections (which he confuses with democracy-- given 2000 in this country, you can understand why). Or he lies, as when he says that Iran's influence in Iraq has been blocked. Another lie is that there was that the US was fighting "al-Qaeda" in Iraq as opposed to just Iraqis. He and Bush even claim that they made Iraqi womens' lives better.
The real question is whether anyone will have the gumption to put Cheney on trial for treason and crimes against humanity.
... The Times needs good ideas, not bad ones, on its op-ed pages. There are none to be had in the modern conservative movement, which is not the same as saying that all good ideas are liberal and progressive ones (although most are). Therefore, neither Kristol nor Douthat nor any other rightwing nut deserves regular access to the Times op-ed pages.
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4 out of every 100 African-American votes went for the GOP ticket, FOUR!
Yet, it appears that virtually every African-American under 40 who voted Republican is a commentator on one of the three cable news networks.
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... Hot, steamy lesbian sex. As read by Bill O'Reilly.
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So the reason I, Fred the Cat, am sharing this with you is just to remind you about the old saying, Make every minute count. Don’t take anything for granted. Hug your honeys.
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After today's meeting between veteran advocacy leaders and the Obama administration, the White House announced that it will be abandoning a plan to make veterans use private insurance for war-related injuries.
The 11 leaders of veterans advocacy groups left today's meeting feeling relieved that veterans' health care wasn't going to be further jeopardized. Journalists caught up with Norbert Ryan, president of Military Officers Association of America, after the meeting. Ryan told reporters, "Our voices were heard. They made the right decision on this."
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Anyway, I guess no one could have predicted that Geithner and Summers would screw the pooch, except for everybody who was horrified that Obama put Geithner and Summers in such sensitive positions. Should've left 'em out in the wilderness where they belonged. And now they're even lying about the position and lying about whose fault it is. Creeps. They should be fired immediately.
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Dodd did not indict the administration in his comments today. He didn't name any names and he said that he didn't think AIG was on the radar at all at the time. He was being a good soldier, as he was when he agreed to the changes thinking he was compromising. But at some point he may have to name names since somebody in Washington is determined that he take the fall for these bonuses and the press is on the hunt to prove that the Obama administration has been lying about when they knew about it.
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The AIG debacle is a slap in the face to American labor, which was asked to sacrifice so automakers could survive.
What we're essentially being asked to believe is that employment contracts involving hardworking men and women on Detroit's assembly lines are somehow less legally binding -- less "sacred" in the current rhetorical argot -- than those protecting a bunch of cowboy securities traders living in Connecticut. When Larry Summers, Obama's chief economic advisor, piously tells us that the administration's hands are tied because we all must abide "by the rule of law," perhaps it's time to ask: What rule and for whom?
For years, the smart guys on Wall Street have convinced a growing number of Americans that organized labor is an impediment to economic progress, an unacceptable "cost" in a globalized system of production, a quaint social fossil from the era of mills and smokestacks. If there's a lesson to be gleaned from the current crisis, however, it's that when the chips are down, organized labor is a far more responsible social actor than the snatch-and-run characters who fancy themselves financiers.
An Obama administration proposal to bill veterans' private insurance companies for combat-related injuries has prompted veterans groups to condemn the plan as unethical, and powerful lawmakers on Capitol Hill have promised to oppose it.
The proposal -- intended to save the Department of Veterans Affairs $530 million a year -- would authorize the VA to bill private insurance companies for treatment of injuries and medical conditions related to military service, such as amputations, post-traumatic stress syndrome and other battle-related conditions. The VA already pursues so-called third-party billing for non-service-related conditions.
Veterans groups said the change would abrogate the government's responsibility to care for the war-wounded. And they expressed concern that the new policy would make employers less willing to hire veterans for fear of the cost of insuring them, and that insurance benefits for veterans' families would also be jeopardized.
Veterans groups described the plan as a puzzling political misstep by the new administration in its relations with the 25 million Americans who have served in the military. Obama heard firsthand about such objections Monday when he met with leaders of the groups at the White House.
Many spectators waved signs that read, “Warrior Spirit Never Dies!” The crowd cheered 76-year-old Evangelina Diaz, a Carpinteria resident of Yaqui descent, who proclaimed she was “a warrior — not a victim!”
What President Obama should have said to the blood-sucking bums at A.I.G., many of them foreigners who were working at the louche London unit, was quite simple: “We stopped the checks. They’re immoral. If you want Americans’ hard-earned cash as a reward for burning up their jobs, homes and savings, sue me.”
Until the Jon Stewart Journalism Deprogramming Center opens for business, all TV interviewers should ask themselves a simple question right before the camera goes on: What would Jon Stewart do?
Cheney may as well have been talking to a John King puppet. More precisely, he may as well have been jacking off with a John King puppet on his hand. Because, apparently, challenges and follow-up questions are to John King what boric acid is to ants. He dare not even step near it.
John King's approach to Cheney was like a cat in heat's approach to an alley tom. He put up his haunches and let the ex-VP go to town. [...]
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What kind of a man is this that he can't even defend his daughter against personal insults from the likes of Laura Ingraham? He doesn't even have a political motivation, as low and cynical as that might be. He won't be running for president again. He's never been a favorite of the right wing and has no reason to curry favor with them now and everything we know about him would suggest that he thinks right wingers like Coulter are political poison. They sure aren't friends of his.
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And here's a general rule of life: When you buy an elephant, you can't refuse to buy the manure that comes with it. You can try, but, soon enough, you'll be knee-deep in problems anyway. And they'll continue to pile up no matter how loudly you complain that "this isn't what I paid for."
We should have learned from the government takeover of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac what dangers lie ahead: The rule of law and political manipulation of the economy don't mix well. Liddy -- the front-line sweeper behind the AIG elephant -- has already warned the administration that letting politics dictate salaries and bonuses will make it difficult for the firm to hold on to talented staff.
The New York Times reports that the administration is worried about a coming "populist backlash." It's right to be worried. But further blurring the lines between politics and the market isn't the answer. That's how we got in this mess in the first place.
The Australian communications regulator says it will fine people who hyperlink to sites on its blacklist, which has been further expanded to include several pages on the anonymous whistleblower site Wikileaks.
Online civil liberties campaigners have seized on the move by ACMA as evidence of how casually the regulator adds to its list of blacklisted sites. It also confirmed fears that the scope of the Government's censorship plan could easily be expanded to encompass sites that are not illegal.
George W. Bush: Should Canada detain him and arrest him for war crimes?
It seems that something similar is going on with Wall Street today. Can anyone doubt that Wall Street's concerted effort to get themselves deregulated, their Rube Goldberg maze of shell corporations and off-shore accounts, and intentional defrauding of ordinary investors, mortgage holders, and retirees has done more damage to our economy than Tim McVeigh, Osama bin Laden, and all the other terrorists to ever blow up anything in the US combined?
And in fact, the connection to terrorism is not just by analogy, but literal. To the degree that we face a legitimate terrorist threat, it is because business interests demand to be put ahead of human rights, democracy, and even the national security of the United States.
Worse, business is a direct cause of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and the Bush administrations failure to bring a quick conclusion to the War on Terror. Those in the Islamic world do not hate us for our freedom, but because we take theirs away to ensure that our oil companies have compliant governments to deal with, from overthrowing the democratically elected secular government of Iran in the 1950s to backing the oppressive Saudi government for decades. Oddly, even though the Joint Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 found direct involvement of the Saudi government in the attacks nothing was done about it. Whether this was done because we didn't want to jeopardize business ties with Saudis or because the Saudis were doing the Bush administration a favor with the attack, neither is acceptable.
And yet, the punishment of the wealthy who endanger and loot us like this will be much like Prescott Bush's. The public will use our taxpayer dollars to clean up their mess, and they will continue to live lives of leisure and be free exercise their power as ''masters of the universe'' even though they are masters of nothing but moving our money into their pockets.
I have no problem with capitalism in theory, but in practice, we can no longer afford a financial elite that not only ignores the law, but buys our politicians and makes the indefensible legal.
Any solution to this current problem has to involve putting the fear of God or at least fear of the wrath of the American people into these spoiled sociopathic trust fund babies, the likes of which no financial elite has felt since the Russian or even French Revolution.
[...] On withdrawing from his nomination as director of the National Intelligence Council, Charles Freeman, former ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a rare provocative thinker in Washington, let loose with a broadside against his enemies. Of accusations from the generally right-wing groups and individuals who claim to represent the Jewish community in official Washington, he wrote:
"There is a special irony in having been accused of improper regard for the opinions of foreign governments and societies by a group so clearly intent on enforcing adherence to the policies of a foreign government -- in this case, the government of Israel. I believe that the inability of the American public to discuss, or the government to consider, any option for US policies in the Middle East opposed by the ruling faction in Israeli politics has allowed that faction to adopt and sustain policies that ultimately threaten the existence of the state of Israel... This is not just a tragedy for Israelis and their neighbors in the Middle East; it is doing widening damage to the national security of the United States."
Freeman put it more metaphorically to me: "It was a nice way of, as the Chinese say, killing a chicken to scare the monkeys." By destroying his appointment, Freeman claimed, the Israel lobby hoped to intimidate other critics of Israel and U.S. Middle East policy who might seek jobs in the Obama administration.
In his interview with me, Freeman noted the propensity members of the Israel lobby have for denying the lobby's existence, even while taking credit for having forced him out and simultaneously claiming that they had nothing to do with it. "We're now at the ludicrous stage where those who boasted of having done it and who described how they did it are now denying that they did it," he said.
"For all of you out there who may have questioned whether there was a powerful 'Israel lobby,' or who admitted that it existed but didn't think it had much influence, or who thought that the real problem was some supposedly all-powerful 'Saudi lobby,' think again."
This new attention to the lobby's work comes at a critical moment, which is why the toppling of Freeman might be its Waterloo.
Perhaps most important of all, Israel is about to be run by an extremist, ultra right-wing government led by Likud Party leader Bibi Netanyahu, and including the even more extreme party of Avigdor Lieberman, as well as a host of radical-right religious parties. It's an ugly coalition that is guaranteed to clash with the priorities of the Obama White House.
So here's the reality behind the Freeman debacle: Already worried over Team Obama, suffering the after-effects of the Gaza debacle, and about to be burdened with the Netanyahu-Lieberman problem, the Israel lobby is undoubtedly running scared. They succeeded in knocking off Freeman, but the true test of their strength is yet to come.
Yesterday on CNN, former Crossfire co-host Tucker Carlson ripped The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart, calling him a “partisan hack” and an operative for the Democratic party who only took on Jim Cramer and CNBC only because they criticized Obama’s budget. “I would like to see somebody have the stones to come out and say, Jon Stewart is kind of a pompous jerk, actually,” Carlson added.
Meghan McCain Tells Laura Ingraham: ‘Kiss My Fat Ass!’
To watch CNBC today is to enter an alternative universe, where élites are populists, Wall Street is Main Street and bank executives are the oppressed. It's not surprising that a voice of opposition to the new Administration would emerge. But who would have thought it would be on a channel not owned by Rupert Murdoch?
CNBC's reaction is colored by its stressed-out day trader's focus on the short term. When ordinary people think about the economy, they think about jobs, college, retirement. Sure, the stock market affects them in the long run — but so do job security and the threat of getting wiped out by health-care bills. When CNBC considers the economy, it means Wall Street's numbers that day, that hour, that minute. CNBC may pay lip service to the long term, but it has the time horizon of a fruit fly.
This means that CNBC looks at everything, particularly politics, in terms of how it will affect "the Market." The commentators on CNBC murmur about the Market as if it were the Island on Lost: a mystic force that must be placated, lest it become angry and punish us. "The Market doesn't like ..." "What the Market wants to see is ..."
And, oooh, is the Market cranky at Obama! The Market doesn't like raising taxes on the wealthy (even if Buffett does). The Market doesn't like government health-care reform or cap-and-trade environmental policy or big budgets or limiting bonuses at bailed-out banks. And don't get the Market started on bank nationalization. That ticks the Market off!
It is as if — between MSNBC and CNBC — NBC News were trying to own the liberal and conservative voices of cable news. But CNBC's is a much different strain of conservatism from Sarah Palin's or Bill O'Reilly's: it is urban, club room and Mammon-oriented rather than small town, VFW hall and God-oriented. It's an ideology not exclusively beholden to party (Cramer voted for Obama), but it's an ideology nonetheless.
It's also an ideology that you'd think, given the track record of trusted financial institutions, people would be a little wary of crowing in public nowadays. But ratings are up. As the rest of the country stews over the mismanagement of insurers and banks, there's still a small, demographically appealing niche for talking heads fulminating against the "demonization" of business and being in favor of laissez-faire government.
Hey, somebody's gotta stick up for the little guy. Even, or especially, when he's the big guy.
Pollution Has Dimmed Skies Over Last 30 Years
NASA releases chart (right) of trackable objects in space.
China's Premier “Worried” About U.S. Debt
Mulls dispatching 300 million debt collectors.
Fermilab Scientists Closer to Finding “God Particle,” They Say
Immediately prior to being struck by lightning bolt.
Shuttle Delivers New Urine Recycling System to Space Station
Astronauts had been complaining about the Tang
Bad News: More 10th-Graders Smoking Marijuana Than Cigarettes
Good news: more 10th-graders smoking marijuana than cigarettes.
Cheney Says He, Bush “Not to Blame” For Current Mess
“We had nothing to do with it,” he adds.
Today's losers losing their homes are Republican districts. At least according to the Center for Responsible Lending, who has just issued a new report that shows nine of the top ten districts with the most [foreclosures] are Republican and most likely to receive the bulk of any homeowner bailout, and thus, at least according to one On Air editor of a major cable network, fit the definition of "losers" ...
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In other words, "Since the Rick Santelli's of the world have been complaining about how the people who would be helped by this bill are so 'irresponsible' and are really just a bunch of 'losers.' .... Rick Santelli's 'losers' may turn out to be the people who are supposedly his ideological fellow travelers."
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At least give credit to Cramer for facing his critics and addressing (and even acknowledging the validity of) the criticisms. By stark contrast, most of our major media stars simply ignore all criticisms of their corrupt behavior and literally suppress it (even if the criticisms appear as major, lengthy front-page exposés in The New York Times).
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He must have been the first cowboy-folk-rap artist. He plays that Martin D-28 with a beat-jazz attitude. A true American original. -- Tom Russell on Jack Elliott
Ship loaded down with TNT
All out across the rollin' sea;
Stood on the deck, watched the fishes swim,
I'se a-prayin' them fish wasn't made out of tin.
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Gonna blow them fascists all to hell!
Win some freedom, liberty, stuff like that.
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I'm just one of the merchant crew,
I belong to the union called the N. M. U.
I'm a union man from head to toe,
I'm U. S. A. and C. I. O.
What has happened between 2001 and 2009 to so radically change the cultural climate? Here, at last, is one piece of good news in our global economic meltdown: Americans have less and less patience for the intrusive and divisive moral scolds who thrived in the bubbles of the Clinton and Bush years. Culture wars are a luxury the country — the G.O.P. included — can no longer afford.
Once again, both the president and the country are following New Deal-era precedent. In the 1920s boom, the reigning moral crusade was Prohibition, and it packed so much political muscle that F.D.R. didn’t oppose it. The Anti-Saloon League was the Moral Majority of its day, the vanguard of a powerful fundamentalist movement that pushed anti-evolution legislation as vehemently as it did its war on booze. (The Scopes “monkey trial” was in 1925.) But the political standing of this crowd crashed along with the stock market. Roosevelt shrewdly came down on the side of “the wets” in his presidential campaign, leaving Hoover to drown with “the dries.”
Much as Obama repealed the Bush restrictions on abortion and stem-cell research shortly after pushing through his stimulus package, so F.D.R. jump-started the repeal of Prohibition by asking Congress to legalize beer and wine just days after his March 1933 inauguration and declaration of a bank holiday. As Michael A. Lerner writes in his fascinating 2007 book “Dry Manhattan,” Roosevelt’s stance reassured many Americans that they would have a president “who not only cared about their economic well-being” but who also understood their desire to be liberated from “the intrusion of the state into their private lives.” Having lost plenty in the Depression, the public did not want to surrender any more freedoms to the noisy minority that had shut down the nation’s saloons.
Frum was contrasting Obama to his own party’s star attraction, Rush Limbaugh, whose “history of drug dependency” and “tangled marital history” make him “a walking stereotype of self-indulgence.” Indeed, the two top candidates for leader of the post-Bush G.O.P, Rush and Newt, have six marriages between them. The party that once declared war on unmarried welfare moms, homosexual “recruiters” and Bill Clinton’s private life has been rebranded by Mark Foley, Larry Craig, David Vitter and the irrepressible Palins. Even before the economy tanked, Americans had more faith in medical researchers using discarded embryos to battle Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s than in Washington politicians making ad hoc medical decisions for Terri Schiavo.
Perkins is now praying that economic failure will be a stimulus for his family-values business. “As the economy goes downward,” he has theorized, “I think people are going to be driven to religion.” Wrong again. The latest American Religious Identification Survey, published last week, found that most faiths have lost ground since 1990 and that the fastest-growing religious choice is “None,” up from 8 percent to 15 percent (which makes it larger than all denominations except Roman Catholics and Baptists). Another highly regarded poll, the General Social Survey, had an even more startling finding in its preliminary 2008 data released this month: Twice as many Americans have a “great deal” of confidence in the scientific community as do in organized religion. How the almighty has fallen: organized religion is in a dead heat with banks and financial institutions on the confidence scale.
History is cyclical, and it would be foolhardy to assume that the culture wars will never return. But after the humiliations of the Scopes trial and the repeal of Prohibition, it did take a good four decades for the religious right to begin its comeback in the 1970s. In our tough times, when any happy news can be counted as a miracle, a 40-year exodus for these ayatollahs can pass for an answer to America’s prayers.
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And yet, just about anybody who actually took the time to kick the tires of Mr. Madoff’s operation tended to run in the other direction. James R. Hedges IV, who runs an advisory firm called LJH Global Investments, says that in 1997 he spent two hours asking Mr. Madoff basic questions about his operation. "The explanation of his strategy, the consistency of his returns, the way he withheld information — it was a very clear set of warning signs," said Mr. Hedges. When you look at the list of Madoff victims, it contains a lot of high-profile names — but almost no serious institutional investors or endowments. They insist on knowing the kind of information Mr. Madoff refused to supply.
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I suppose you could argue that most of Mr. Madoff's direct investors lacked the ability or the financial sophistication of someone like Mr. Hedges. But it shouldn't have mattered. Isn’t the first lesson of personal finance that you should never put all your money with one person or one fund? Even if you think your money manager is "God"? Diversification has many virtues; one of them is that you won't lose everything if one of your money managers turns out to be a crook.
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And that’s the point. People did abdicate responsibility — and now, rather than face that fact, many of them are blaming the government for not, in effect, saving them from themselves. Indeed, what you discover when you talk to victims is that they harbor an anger toward the S.E.C. that is as deep or deeper than the anger they feel toward Mr. Madoff. There is a powerful sense that because the agency was asleep at the switch, they have been doubly victimized. And they want the government to do something about it.
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But why? What happened to the victims of Bernard Madoff is terrible. But every day in this country, people lose money due to financial fraud or negligence. Innocent investors who bought stock in Enron lost millions when that company turned out to be a fraud; nobody made them whole. Half a dozen Ponzi schemes have been discovered since Mr. Madoff was arrested in December. People lose it all because they start a company that turns out to be misguided, or because they do something that is risky, hoping to hit the jackpot. Taxpayers don’t bail them out, and they shouldn’t start now. Did the S.E.C. foul up? You bet. But that doesn’t mean the investors themselves are off the hook. Investors blaming the S.E.C. for their decision to give every last penny to Bernie Madoff is like a child blaming his mother for letting him start a fight while she wasn’t looking.
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