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1. Andy Borowitz: Bush to Phase Out Environment by 2009
- President George W. Bush confirmed today that his gutting of the Endangered Species Act is part of a broader plan to phase out the environment entirely by the time he leaves office in January of 2009.
The president said that by removing endangered species from the protected list one by one, his administration has been able to phase out the environment gradually “so that hardly anyone will notice it’s missing.”
Mr. Bush’s plan calls for a gradual reduction of air and water, with water most likely to get the axe.
“If it comes down to choosing between air and water, the president will probably scrap water,” said Environmental Prevention Agency chief Stephen L. Johnson. “After all, most Iraqis have been without water since 2003 and look how well they’re doing.”
Elsewhere, after Pope Benedict XVI prayed for peace on Easter Sunday, Vice President Dick Cheney requested equal time for war.
Elsewhere (2), CIA analysts said they doubted the authenticity of a new instant message from Osama bin Laden, noting that the al-Qaeda leader has never before signed off with “LOL.” www.borowitzreport.com
2. Body of War (trailer)
http://www.bodyofwar.com
Phil Donahue talks about “Body of War” at http://www.c-spanarchives.org/library/index.php?main_page=product_video_info&products_id=204350-1
3. Iraqi Blogs
- http://baghdadtreasure.blogspot.com/
http://twentyfourstepstoliberty.blogspot.com/
http://www.last-of-iraqis.blogspot.com/
4. Tax breaks for yacht owners (video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AISA-Rj2mzc
5. From the DAILY GRILL
- Iran “declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to “destroy people.”” -- Bush 3.21.08
VERSUS
“"[The President’s statement] is as uninformed as [Sen. John] McCain's statement that Iran is training al-Qaeda. Iran has never said it wanted a nuclear weapon for any reason. It's just not true.” – Non-proliferation expert Joe Cirincione 3.21.08
The surge is succeeding and the key to it is not American presence, it’s American casualties and by any measure, we are succeeding and the political process is succeeding. -- John McCain (R-AZ) 3.08.08
VERSUS
We have lost over 900 dead Americans since the surge. Now if you want to dismiss that as ’success’ that would be your interpretation. -- Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) 3.23.08
"[A]ttacks on American forces are down [in Iraq]. ... The surge is working." -- Bush, 3/19/08
VERSUS
"American forces have just experienced the most violent two-week period in Iraq since September 2007. ... Between March 10 and March 23, 25 American soldiers were killed in Iraq." -- VoteVets.org, 3/24/08
"Newly declassified documents captured in Iraq show that Saddam Hussein's regime had extensive ties with a variety of Islamist and other terrorist groups." -- Washington Times, 3/24/08 <>
VERSUS
"This study found no 'smoking gun' (i.e. direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and Al-Qaeda." - Pentagon study, 3/13/08
"He has never said that this war would be easy. He has been the guy saying for four years that we’re getting it wrong. We need more troops." -- Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), 3/25/08
VERSUS
"But the point is that, one, we will win this conflict. We will win it easily." -- Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), MSNBC, 1/22/03
6. Iraq's 80,000 Angry Men and the Collapse of the Surge (video)
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/80527/
7. John McCain's surrogates
John McCain should be having a very bad week. Fortunately for him, McCain's unofficial surrogates -- also known as "reporters" -- have leaped to his defense on a range of topics.
Despite obsessing over the fact that Hillary Clinton has not publicly released her tax returns, media are ignoring John McCain's failure to do so. If McCain were to release his tax returns, we might see, for example, additional details about the financial ties between McCain, his wife, and Charles Keating, a prime figure in the savings and loan scandals of the late 1980s. McCain and Keating vacationed together in the Bahamas, Keating gave McCain free use of his private jet (a violation of ethics rules; McCain eventually paid for the flights), and McCain's wife invested in a shopping mall with Keating. After McCain joined four other senators in urging federal regulators to go easy on Keating's savings and loan, McCain was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee.
But reporters aren't asking about when John McCain will release his taxes, and for what years. Worse, some are falsely giving him credit for having already done so. More at http://mediamatters.org/items/200803210010
8. Colbert Reminds Us of McCain's Embrace of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell (video)
http://www.alternet.org/blogs/election08/80456/
9. White House: Computer hard drives tossed
The White House revealed new information about how it handles its computers (it destroys them!) in an effort to persuade a federal magistrate it would be fruitless to undertake an e-mail recovery plan that the court proposed. PETE YOST 3.21.08 http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080321/ap_on_go_pr_wh/white_house_e_mail;_ylt=Asb5LHAk89gUyAJDNa6gdCeyFz4D
10. "Stop-Loss" (video)
New film explores systematic abuse of Iraq war veterans http://www.alternet.org/blogs/video/#80492 (NOTE: "Stop-Loss" opens in San Diego on March 28th.)
11. U.S. close to reaching 500 American deaths in Afghanistan
The U.S. has lost 488 members of the military in the forgotten war since the invasion after 9/11 according to iCasualties.org.
Last year, 117 Americans perished in the Afghan war - a record - amid a NATO offensive. But now, top U.S. commanders concede they're losing ground. JAMES GORDON MEEK 3.25.08 http://www.nydailynews.com/news/us_world/2008/03/25/2008-03-25_us_close_to_reaching_500_american_deaths.html
12. Standard Operating Procedure (trailer)
http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony/standardoperatingprocedure/trailer/
13. John McCain is a "campaign finance criminal" (video)
Jane Hamsher from FireDogLake delivers McCain complaint to the FEC at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-u3WbiCcQ8
14. Jon Stewart: Iraq - The First Five Years (video)
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2008/03/iraq_the_first.html
15. Superdelegates Look Down, Look Up for Assistance
Most of the superdelegates who have yet to pick sides in the Democratic presidential primary appear to be waiting for another authority — either voters or party leaders — to select their party’s nominee.
With neither candidate in a position to win enough pledged delegates to garner the nomination or enough popular votes to claim a clear mandate, the elected leaders and other party officials who make up the superdelegate corps are increasingly looking farther up the party hierarchy for decisive action.
As the end of the primary season draws nearer — and their role in determining the nominee grows clearer — there is no help on the horizon. Jonathan Allen 3.25.08 http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=news-000002692073
16. Telecom lobbyists tied to McCain
Republican presidential candidate John McCain has condemned the influence of "special interest lobbyists," yet dozens of lobbyists have political and financial ties to his presidential campaign — particularly from telecommunications companies, an industry he helps oversee in the Senate.
Of the 66 current or former lobbyists working for the Arizona senator or raising money for his presidential campaign, 23 have lobbied for telecommunications companies in the past decade, Senate lobbying disclosures show.
McCain has netted about $765,000 in political donations from those telecom lobbyists, their spouses, colleagues at their firms and their telecom clients during the past decade, a USA TODAY analysis of campaign-finance records shows. Matt Kelley 3.24.08 http://www.usatoday.com/news/politics/election2008/2008-03-23-mccainlobbyists_N.htm
17. Late-Night Political Jokes for Dems
- "Did you hear about this? Two State Department employees were fired -- this is a bit of a scandal -- because they were looking at Barack Obama's passport file. Not only that, but the same person was also looking at John McCain's Civil War records." --David Letterman
"This week, John McCain received a warm welcome in Israel. He was in Israel. You know, he is hugely popular in Israel ever since he stood with the Jewish people against the pharaoh. They've never forgotten." --Jay Leno
"President Bush's approval rating has reached a record low -- 31%. Wow. His popularity is so low now, on his Facebook page, he only has imaginary friends." --Jay Leno
"President Bush spoke about the war in Iraq again today. This week marks the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the war. Bush said turning back now would harm all the gains we've made. Like oil $100 a barrel, worthless dollar, a recession. We can't afford to lose any of that!" --Jay Leno
I mentioned earlier this week, in Hawaii, the price of gas, over $4 a gallon. Man. Once again, I think President Bush is a little confused. When he heard about this he said, "You know, I'm more concerned about the price of gasoline here in America." --Jay Leno
"And today, John McCain was in England, where he visited his birthplace, Stonehenge." --Jay Leno
"Well, we have former presidential candidate John Edwards on the show tonight. He ran a terrific campaign. His No. 1 issue, of course, was the poor and those who live in poverty. Or, as we call them now, Bear Sterns stockholders." --Jay Leno
"According to a new CNN poll just out today, John McCain would win the presidential election if only beer drinkers voted. Now, a Democrat, either Hillary or Barack would win, if only wine drinkers voted. But here's the interesting part, if we all got really drunk on tequila, Ralph Nader might actually have a shot." --Jay Leno
"Republican presidential nominee John McCain is in Iraq this week. He said his goal as president is to introduce to the Iraqi people the concept of the early bird special. Yeah, eating dinner at 4:30." --Jay Leno
"Today marks the five-year anniversary of the war in Iraq, and President Bush said his decision to invade was 'remarkably effective.' Yeah, that's why we're still there after five years. Happy Anniversary!" --Jay Leno
"Interesting fact came out today on the new $5 bill. It turns out it used to be the old $10 bill." --Jay Leno
"How about that John McCain, ladies and gentlemen? Do you like John McCain? John McCain recently said that he supports George Bush's Iraq policy. I said, well, sure, slice me eight more years of that, will ya?" --David Letterman
"I do like John McCain. He looks like a guy who thinks he is sheriff of the neighborhood, you know? 'You're going to have to trim back those hedges. You are gonna have to get out there and trim them back.' ... He looks like the guy who is a regular at the paint store. 'What color is that? You gotta use that up. I'm looking for a Humbolt Blue.' ... He looks like a guy who walks by your house with his arthritic dog." --David Letterman
"Vice President Dick Cheney, you know where he is right now? He's in Baghdad. He visited there. While he was in Iraq, he said that it's a successful endeavor. At least I think that's what he said. It was hard to hear over the explosions." --David Letterman
"How about the economy? You folks jittery about the economy? And the stock market? ... George Bush, earlier today, reassured the country about the economy. He said, 'I'm on top of it.' George W. Bush, our president, said I'm on top it. I said to myself, well, that's good enough for me." --David Letterman
"John McCain's daughter is in the news. John McCain's daughter says that a lot of guys don't want to date her because her dad makes her too high-profile. Yeah. That's part of the reason. It's also because McCain's daughter is 63 years old. ... Her name is Mable. She was a nurse in the Korean War. Lovely girl." --Conan O'Brien
"So the last governor was going to hookers. The new governor admits to having an affair. Do you think New York is longing for the good old days when Rudy Giuliani would just run around in women's clothes?" --Jay Leno
"Vice President Dick Cheney went to Iraq. Or, as he calls it, Spring Break." --Jay Leno
"Did you see Cheney on the news, sitting with the troops having breakfast? Did you see the breakfast in front of him? The plate was loaded with sausage, bacon, eggs. Who put that meal together? al Qaeda? Was that their plan? Wait for his heart to explode when he's in Iraq." --Jay Leno
"Speaking of that, this week marks the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war and the third anniversary of 'Mission Accomplished.' ... Remember critics saying, oh, the war was just about oil so we could keep the price of gasoline cheap? That worked out well, didn't it? Now we're the ones with shock and awe." --Jay Leno
"I've been watching that John Adams miniseries on HBO. You seen this? Boy, it's really good. You know, it's fun to see all the Founding Fathers. They're all in it. John Adams, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John McCain" --Jay Leno
18. Torture Hits Home
The Abu Ghraib scandal's leadership lattice, along with Mother Jones’ compendium of exclusive investigative reports, first-person accounts, audio, photos, and stats is at http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2008/03/abu-ghraib-chain-of-command.html
19. David Letterman: George of the Bumble (video)
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2008/03/george_of_the_b_1.html
20. Bush Administration War Profiteer Hall of Shame
With the award last January of a federal contract worth as much as nearly $300 million, AEY Inc., which is run by 22 year-old Efraim Diveroli and operates out of an unmarked office in Miami Beach, became the main supplier of munitions to Afghanistan’s army and police forces.
Since then, the company has provided ammunition that is more than 40 years old and in decomposing packaging, according to an examination of the munitions by The New York Times and interviews with American and Afghan officials. Much of the ammunition comes from the aging stockpiles of the old Communist bloc, including stockpiles that the State Department and NATO have determined to be unreliable and obsolete, and have spent millions of dollars to have destroyed. C. J. CHIVERS 3.27.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/world/asia/27ammo.html
21. Recession: The Movie (video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4OOCReeLWo
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1. Greg Mitchell: 5 Years Later: Pundits Who Were Wrong on Iraq Are Silent
Given the current tragedy in Iraq--hell, given the past five years--you would think the many pundits who agitated for an attack on that country, largely on false pretenses, would have take the opportunity of the arrival of the fifth anniversary of the war (or the 4000 dead milestone) to drop to their knees, at least in print, and beg the American public for forgiveness. 3.25.08 http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/columns/pressingissues_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003732704&imw=Y
2. JOHN ROSS: What Do We Owe Iraq?
Lurching down Valencia Street in San Francisco last week, I all but stumbled over a homeless young man squatting against the wall of the now moribund New College. Begging his pardon, I could not help but note that he was leafing through a dog-eared volume scavenged from a nearby free book box serendipitously entitled "What We Owe Iraq." Indeed, my inattentiveness to the young man's pedal extremities was the by-product of my contemplation of just that subject.
What do we owe Iraq for over a million dead and ten times that number wounded or otherwise devastated in five years of Bush's unrelenting bloodletting?
For 5,000,000 people who have been uprooted and displaced from their homes, half of them forced to flee their homeland, 65% of them women and children, 80% of the children less than 12 years of age?
What do we owe Iraq for having perverted governance into an aggregation of death squads? For corrupting public officials and leveling essential services, leaving the nation in the dark most days, contaminating the water supply, destroying the agricultural sector in the birthplace of agriculture, and aiding and abetting the looting of the cradle of civilization?
What do we owe this country "where the first letter was written, the first law put, the first university built, the first money issued, and the first poetry written?" asks Eman Kammas, a fearless Iraqi journalist now forced into exile.
The $3,000,000.000.000 USD Joseph Stiglitz calculates this illegal war will cost U.S. taxpayers will not compensate Iraq in per capita reparations. The quotient of Iraqi blood shed in this genocidal exercise cannot nearly be repaid by all the hemoglobin extracted from the 4000 dead Americans who gave up their lives in this pointless fracaso. The blood they spilled is only a drop in this bottomless bucket.
What do we owe Iraq? The damage can never be quantified. "The debt is too great to comprehend," considers my colleague Sasha Crow, founder of the Collateral Repair Project whose NGO seeks to repair some of the damage done. 3.20.08 http://www.counterpunch.org/ross03202008.html
3. Lou Dubose: Selling a Military Budget That Will "Make the Rubble Bounce"
A WEEK BEFORE HE SLIPPED ON ICE and broke his arm and a month before the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was sitting before the House Armed Services Committee defending a $515.4 billion budget, which in truth is far larger than $515.4 billion. The 2009 fiscal year budget includes a 7.5 percent increase over the previous year's spending on the military and consumes about four percent of the gross domestic product.
When Washington Democrat Rick Larsen asked Gates how "four percent of gross domestic product" became the defense budget baseline, Gates explained that he begins the process determined to ensure "absolute real growth." Then, like his predecessors, he somehow arrives at four percent.
After the hearing, I had to check my notes against the transcript. The three words—"absolute real growth"—lost in four hours of testimony seemed stunningly newsworthy. The United States currently spends more on defense than the combined defense expenditures of all the other countries in the world. "Absolute real growth" in such circumstances recalls Churchill's cold war warning that additional missiles could only serve "to make the rubble bounce."
Yet the secretary of defense was laying out an expansive budget while the economy was contracting, the Treasury running huge deficits, and the president refusing to raise taxes to pay for two wars that will cost the next two generations billions in principle and interest—much of it paid out to strategic adversaries such as the Chinese, who are underwriting the war in Iraq by serving as America's creditor. 3.01.08 http://www.washingtonspectator.com/articles/20080301fourpercent.cfm
4. Jacob S. Hacker: Let's Try a Dose. We're Bound to Feel Better.
"Socialized medicine" is the bogeyman that just won't die. The epithet has been hurled at every national health plan since the New Deal -- even Medicare, which critics warned would strip Americans of their freedom.
And now it's back. Republicans from President Bush on down have invoked the specter of socialism in denouncing Democrats' attempts to expand publicly funded health insurance for children. Erstwhile GOP presidential contenders Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney lambasted the health plans of the leading Democratic candidates for mimicking "the socialist solution they have in Europe" (Giuliani) and trying to impose "a European-style socialized medicine plan" (Romney). The presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, hasn't used the S-word yet, but after sewing up the nomination in early March, he criticized Democrats for intending "to return to the failed, big-government mandates of the '60s and '70s to address problems such as the lack of health-care insurance for some Americans."
Never mind that nobody is proposing to turn doctors into public employees and hospitals into government institutions -- the literal meaning of socialized medicine. The slogan gets its punch because it invokes a visceral public fear: that government involvement will drive up costs and drive down quality, wrecking the economy and damaging your health. Expanding government's role, the naysayers insist, will destroy what McCain calls "the world's best medical care."
But the critics have it backward. The best American medical care is indeed extremely good, but much of our system falls short -- especially when you consider how costly it is, how heavy a burden it places on employers and families, and how many it excludes. And far from being a threat, getting the government more involved in health care would actually reduce costs, improve quality and bolster the U.S. economy -- which helps explain why public insurance is the secret weapon in both of the leading Democratic candidates' plans. If socialized medicine means doing what our public-insurance programs and other nations' health systems do to control costs, expand coverage and improve the quality of care, it's high time for a little socialization. 3.23.08 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/21/AR2008032102743.html
5. Mickey Edwards: Dick Cheney's Error
For at least six years, as I've become increasingly frustrated by the Bush administration's repeated betrayal of constitutional -- and conservative -- principles, I have defended Vice President Cheney, a man I've known for decades and with whom I served and made common cause in Congress. No longer.
I do not blame Dick Cheney for George W. Bush's transgressions; the president needs no prompting to wrap himself in the cloak of a modern-day king. Nor do I believe that the vice president so enthusiastically supports the Iraq war out of a loyalty to the oil industry that his former employer serves. By all accounts, Cheney's belief in "the military option" and the principle of president-as-decider predates his affiliation with Halliburton.
What, then, is the straw that causes me to finally consign a man I served with in the House Republican leadership to the category of "those about whom we should be greatly concerned"?
It is Cheney's all-too-revealing conversation this week with ABC News correspondent Martha Raddatz. On Wednesday, reminded of the public's disapproval of the war in Iraq, now five years old, the vice president shrugged off that fact (and thus, the people themselves) with a one-word answer: "So?"
"So," Mr. Vice President? 3.22.08 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/21/AR2008032102482.html
6. Raed Jarrar: The Iraqi Civil War Bush and the Media Don't Tell You About
While the majority of Iraqis know that the current Sunni-Shiites tension did not exist before 2003, no one can deny that after five years of U.S. occupation, sectarian tension is now a reality. Sectarianism is another disaster that was brought to Iraq by the war and occupation of Iraq.
The U.S.-led invasion did not only destroy the Baath political regime, it also annihilated the entire public sector including education, health care, food rations, social security, and the armed forces. The Iraqi public sector was a great example of how millions of Iraqis: Arabs and Kurds, Sunnis and Shiites, Muslims and Christians, religious and secular, all worked together in running the country. The myth that the former Iraqi government was a "Sunni-led dictatorship" was created by the U.S. government. Even the Iraqi political regime was not "Sunni-led," let alone the rest of the public sector. A good way to debunk this fairy tale is through a close look at the famous deck of cards of the 55 most wanted Iraqi leaders. The cards had the pictures of Saddam, his two sons, and the rest of the political leadership which most Iraqis would recognize as the heads of the political regime. What is noteworthy is that 36 of the 55 were Shiites. In fact, the two vice presidents were a Christian and a Shiites Kurd.
Sometimes I feel like Iraqis and Americans are analyzing two different wars happening in two different countries. In one narrative, there is a civil war based on ancient sectarian hatred where a U.S. withdrawal will cause the sky to fall. In the other, there is a country struggling under occupation to get its independence back where the occupation is not welcomed and it is causing political, not sectarian, splits and violence. 3.24.08 http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/80469/
7. Paul Krugman: Taming the Beast
We’re now in the midst of an epic financial crisis, which ought to be at the center of the election debate. But it isn’t.
Now, I don’t expect presidential campaigns to have all the answers to our current crisis — even financial experts are scrambling to keep up with events. But I do think we’re entitled to more answers, and in particular a clearer commitment to financial reform, than we’re getting so far.
In truth, I don’t expect much from John McCain, who has both admitted not knowing much about economics and denied having ever said that. Anyway, lately he’s been busy demonstrating that he doesn’t know much about the Middle East, either.
Yet the McCain campaign’s silence on the financial crisis has disappointed even my low expectations.
And when Mr. McCain’s economic advisers do speak up about the economy’s problems, they don’t inspire confidence. For example, last week one McCain economic adviser — Kevin Hassett, the co-author of “Dow 36,000” — insisted that everything would have been fine if state and local governments hadn’t tried to limit urban sprawl. Honest. 3.24.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/opinion/24krugman.html
8. The Democrats' anti-momentum
Forget buyer's remorse -- the real malady likely to be triggered by the never-ending Democratic presidential race is buyer's confusion. It has already been seven weeks since a majority of Democrats cast their votes in the Woozy Tuesday Feb. 5 primaries, and even longer in fast-forward states like Iowa and New Hampshire. Those voters picked their candidates back in the innocent days when Bear Stearns was regarded as a pillar of Wall Street and Eliot Spitzer a pillar of rectitude.
Sixteen years ago, the last time the Democrats won back the White House, fewer than half the delegates had been selected by the end of March, with big-state primaries in New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and California still on the docket. This campaign year the Democrats are already down to seeds and stems with 82 percent of the delegates having been chosen by March 11. This simple arithmetical fact -- combined with the scheduling of the 2008 Democratic Convention six weeks later than in 1992 -- is what gives such an air of unreality to the final installments of the Barack Obama-Hillary Clinton soap opera.
With the chances to rerun the outlaw Michigan and Florida primaries now at the vanishing point, it may be time to inquire about a do-over for the rest of America. This is not an argument for Clinton, who otherwise probably has too far to go and too few remaining primaries to get there. But after a week punctuated by Obama's right-stuff response to wrong-way Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Clinton's document dump of today-tea-was-served White House schedules, Democrats are being barraged with new information about the candidates long after most of them have made a binding decision on a nominee. It is akin to being given a subscription to Consumer Reports the day after you bought a new car. 3.24.08 http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/03/24/dem_remorse/
9. Gary Kamiya: Rev. Jeremiah Wright isn't the problem
Maybe we really are doomed to elect John McCain, remain in Iraq forever and nuke Iran. Nations that forget history may not be doomed to repeat it, but those that never even recognize reality in the first place definitely are. Last week's ridiculous uproar over Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons proves yet again that America has still not come to terms with the most rudimentary facts about race, 9/11 -- or itself.
The great shock so many people claim to be feeling over Wright's sermons is preposterous. Anyone who is surprised and horrified that some black people feel anger at white people, and America, is living in a racial never-never land. Wright has called the U.S. "the United States of White America," talks about the "oppression" of black people and says, "White America got their wake-up call after 9/11." Gosh, who could have dreamed that angry racial grievances and left-wing political views are sometimes expressed in black churches? 3.25.08 http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/03/25/rev_jeremiah_wright/
10. The Private Sector’s Tramping in Iraq
As the nonpareil war profiteer in Iraq, Blackwater Worldwide keeps outdoing its own mercenary record. Ranking Blackwater executives have used inside influence as administration fund-raisers to multiply their no-bid war contracts a thousandfold to more than $1 billion. Armed Blackwater guards redefined Ugly American for the Iraqi people last September in fatally shooting 17 civilians with impunity in a burst of “spray and pray” panic on the streets of Baghdad.
And now Congressional investigators report dodgy bookkeeping by which Blackwater insists its 850 operatives in Iraq are separate contractors, not employees. That little device has allowed the company to avoid paying an estimated $50 million in American payroll taxes.
Tax and labor laws may have been violated by Blackwater’s being awarded $144 million in contracts that were supposed to go to small businesses. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House government oversight committee, is calling for a multiagency investigation.
The sooner the better for taxpayers. Blackwater officials insist that they are entitled by law to classify their hirelings as non-employees. But the Internal Revenue Service has concluded otherwise, finding Blackwater’s designation of a security guard as an independent contractor to be “without merit.” 3.24.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/24/opinion/24mon3.html
11. Eugene Robinson: The Next 4,000
When U.S. military deaths in Iraq hit a round number, as happened Sunday, there’s usually a week or so of intense focus on the war—its bogus rationale, its nebulous aims, its awful consequences for the families of the dead. Not likely this time, though. The nation is too busy worrying about more acute crises, some of them real—the moribund housing market, the teetering financial system, the flagging economy—and some of them manufactured, such as the shocking revelation that race can still be a divisive issue in American society.
So the fact that 4,000 men and women serving in the U.S. armed forces have been killed in Iraq is somehow less compelling than the zillionth playing of snippets from a sermon that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright preached more than six years ago.
For now, that is: Sooner or later, attention is bound to turn back to the war and the stark choice voters will face in November.
It may happen sooner. A few weeks ago, it looked as if Iraq might be entering another cycle of headline-grabbing violence. Now, the increase in mayhem is clear. On Sunday alone, more than 60 people were killed in several incidents, including a car bombing. Insurgents even sent rockets crashing into Baghdad’s ostensibly secure Green Zone, a rare occurrence. While the violence hasn’t risen to the levels at this time a year ago, when the country seemed to be coming apart, it is clear that both civilian and military deaths are on the rise.
Dick Cheney, who long ago told us that the insurgency was “in the last throes, if you will,” was asked last week about polls showing that two-thirds of Americans don’t think the fight in Iraq is worth it. Cheney’s response: “So?”
At least Cheney was being candid, if breathtakingly arrogant. He and George W. Bush have never cared what the American people might think about this elective war. A little bamboozling was necessary at the beginning—overblown claims about weapons of mass destruction, mushroom clouds and being “greeted as liberators” by smiling Iraqi children. Once that hurdle was surmounted, and once Saddam Hussein’s government had been destroyed, there was essentially nothing anyone could do to force the Bush administration to bring the war to an end. 3.24.08 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080324_the_next_4000/
12. Susan J. Douglas: Debt: Our 9 Trillion Pound Gorilla
Who would have thought that we might ever miss Ross Perot?
Squawking at us with his graphs and pie charts about the dangers of deficit spending and the mounting national debt, Perot was especially outraged that the debt had gone from $1 trillion in 1980 to $4 trillion by 1992.
He got people’s attention about mortgaging our children’s futures and won 19 percent of the vote in the 1992 presidential race, the most for a third party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912. (This despite being featured on the cover of Weekly World News with space aliens.)
As we brace for the Swiftboating to come this summer, I find myself nostalgic for a Perot infomercial where he would make clear that my daughter, or my friend’s infant—all of us, as of now—each carries nearly $31,000 of this debt. And we don’t owe it only to each other.
We are in major hock to China, Japan and other foreign countries. Given the subprime disaster, rising unemployment, a reeling stock market, a teetering construction industry and considerable under-reported inflation—you know, all the markings of the “r” word—it is striking that the debt is not a major campaign issue for the Democrats. 3.25.08 http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3573/
13. Linda McQuaig: Iraq war botched and illegal
Apart from a few enthusiasts of the "surge," most commentators now regard the Iraq war as a terrible mistake. With Democrats likely to take the White House next year, the focus seems to be shifting to the problem of extricating U.S. troops.
Can the war then be chalked up to a painful lesson learned?
On the contrary, after five years of war, it seems that no real lesson has been learned. Indeed, there's a refusal to even acknowledge why it was wrong to invade Iraq.
Sure, there's lots of criticism of the Bush administration for poor war planning, and for squandering U.S. lives and "treasure."
All this is true, but it skirts a more fundamental problem – one that was barely mentioned in all the fifth-year anniversary commentaries last week – that the invasion was a war of aggression carried out in defiance of international law.
This is not a mere technicality. According to the Nuremberg Tribunal, set up by the Allies after World War II: "War is essentially an evil thing ... To initiate a war of aggression, therefore, is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime." 3.25.08 http://www.thestar.com/columnists/article/350328
14. Mark Morford: Schools? Health care? As if
Bush is in his final year. This is both the good news, and also the very, very bad news. Because we are now in the death throes of the worst administration in modern history, entering the period of serious consequences, of economic collapse, environmental impact, record oil prices, international recoil, rashes, boils, inexplicable vomiting. Fun for the whole family.
Know this for a fact. Bush does not care. He is detached, supercilious, viciously ignorant of anything but how beautifully he has served his corporate masters, of how he has raked in billions of dollars for Halliburton and Lockheed Martin and Exxon and the coal industry, mercenary armies and military manufacturers and his dad's Saudi friends. He is on no one's side but theirs, and he always has been.
Some say this pain, this fiscal crisis, this enormous instability will last a few years. Some say no way, it will be at least a generation or two before we can right this ship of state again, so deep are the wounds and so insane is our national debt and so violent the damage to our reputation, our identity, our enfeebled infrastructure.
But I'm more with those who say, no, the truth is we will never truly recover, that America's former ranking as Gilded and Irreproachable Empire No. 1 is dead and gone. India and China are dramatically changing the game, peak oil is nigh, fresh water is the new gold, the planet itself is in paroxysm, Mother Nature is quickly revealing her hand — or rather, maybe just that one big, stormy middle finger.
But maybe this is the best news of all. Because the sort of gluttonous empire Bush so disgustingly represented was doomed to failure. The center could not hold. Dubya may not have hastened the apocalypse like the evangelicals desperately prayed he would, but he certainly is hastening the end of the bloviated American ego.
So maybe the real question is not can we return to our former ill-gotten superpower glory, insular and unparalleled and reckless and arrogant, or even peaceful and defensive and ironclad. The true question is, do we have the slightest clue what we want to become instead? 3.26.08 http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2008/03/26/notes032608.DTL&nl=fix
15. The Campaign Monitor Goes Missing
Moneywise, this is an eerily liberating time to be running for president or Congress. Donations are being harvested and spent at a record rate, while the Federal Election Commission — the campaign’s designated referee — has been reduced to a nonentity.
The panel has been unable to meet and function this year because it no longer has enough members to do business. There are four vacancies on the six-member commission, and a political standoff in the Senate centered on a hack Republican nominee is blocking attempts to fill them.
Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate’s Republican leader, has insisted that the four seats be filled as a single package on one vote, not separate votes on the merits of the individuals. Democrats object to one Republican nominee, Hans von Spakovsky, a notorious partisan who built a record at the Justice Department as an aggressive G.O.P. booster undermining voting rights for minorities and the poor.
Lacking a quorum, the commission has been left powerless to issue advisory opinions for candidates, write new reform regulations, open investigations and file lawsuits against violators. The result is a scofflaw’s paradise. The political landscape’s big-money fast lanes are slick enough without having the only traffic controller gone missing. 3.26.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/26/opinion/26wed3.html
16. Marie Cocco: Nixon’s Heir
Some days, there’s just no forgetting that Dick Cheney is still the vice president of the United States. We’ve had a few of these recently, with Cheney traveling to Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East on what might be called a goodwill mission, if the person making the trip were not Dick Cheney.
Many startling comments tumbled from the vice president’s lips. His verbal jousting with ABC’s Martha Raddatz over the recent National Intelligence Estimate conclusion that Iran had stopped trying to build a nuclear weapon around 2003 is one scary discussion. Examining this back-and-forth, you cannot help but conclude that Cheney does not put much stock in the NIE, and considers there to be little, if any, difference between the ongoing Iranian uranium enrichment program and a weapons program. It is all eerily reminiscent of the lack of distinction Cheney made between Saddam Hussein’s regime and the band of Afghanistan-based terrorists who attacked us on 9/11. Of course, Cheney uses the interview to deliver the obligatory shake of his saber in Iran’s direction: “The president has made it clear that our objective is to make certain they do not acquire the capacity to produce nuclear weapons.”
Cheney also declared that it didn’t really matter that two-thirds of Americans think the Iraq war wasn’t worth fighting—“So?” the vice president responded. After all, real leaders in a democracy don’t give a hoot about what the people think and don’t follow those cursed opinion polls. Given a second chance a few days later to elaborate on his point, Cheney likened President Bush’s decision to go to war in Iraq with Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon.
It takes one to know one, sort of.
Cheney is the most Nixonian figure in American politics since—well, since Nixon. You could say that he speaks with some authority about that era, marked as it was by abuse of presidential power, an obsession with secrecy and the continuation of a disastrous war in Vietnam that cost thousands of American lives and cleaved the nation into political factions that have never fully reconciled. 3.26.08 http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080327_nixons_heir/
17. A Foolish Immigration Purge
Leave it to the Bush administration to throw thousands of law-abiding American workers and companies off a cliff in perilous economic times.
That would be the effect of its decision to press ahead with a bad idea: to force businesses to fire employees whose names don’t match the Social Security database. The purge is part of a campaign — along with scattershot workplace raids and the partial border fence — to make a show of tackling the broken immigration system.
The burden on law-abiding companies would be great: thousands of dollars to comply with the rules, and thousands more to fire and replace workers. An honest employer who does things by the book would face an excruciating choice — to keep good workers despite dubious “no-match” letters and face harsh fines, or to fire them and face discrimination lawsuits.
All this churning, meanwhile, will be a boon for the unscrupulous businesses that hire off the books and have no use for W-2s. It’s a law-and-order strategy that undermines law and order. 3.27.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/opinion/27thu2.html
18. Joseph L. Galloway: Shame on Them and Shame on Us
This week, the Iraq war claimed its 4,000th American killed in action, but that sad and tragic milestone came as the war seems to have slipped off the evening news, off the front pages and from the minds of the American people.
I suppose this benign neglect of so important and damaging an event is combat fatigue on the part of the public. No doubt the White House is happy to see Iraq shoved to a back burner, just as all three presidential candidates are relieved to talk about something else, anything else, but their half-baked ideas about the war.
Shame on them, and shame on us, for such callous indifference to the service, sacrifice and suffering of the families of the dead, wounded and injured troops who’ve given so much for so little in return.
Vice President Cheney again stuck both feet in his mouth by saying and then repeating that we should remember that our military is composed entirely of volunteers; that our troops all volunteered for this duty, this burden, this sacrifice.
What’s your point, Mr. Vice President? That because they volunteered to serve our country in uniform it’s okay to squander their lives in a war of choice, your choice and your president’s, and that it somehow matters less than if they’d been dragooned into service by press gangs or a draft like the one you dodged with five deferments during the Vietnam War because, you said, you had “better things to do?” 3.27.08 http://www.mcclatchydc.com/galloway/story/31672.html
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