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MinutemanMedia.org

Fri, 11 Jan 2008 20:56:07 GMT

I BUY, THEREFORE I AM – by Donald Kaul

Did you see that the price of oil got up over $100-a-barrel the other day, before falling back a few cents? If you didn’t, don’t worry about it; you’ll get another chance. Soon.

While experts are predicting a near-term retreat from $100 oil---because we seem to be teetering on the edge of a recession---they also predict a surge to $120 or so in the summer when the driving season kicks in.

That’s a lot, $120-a-barrel. It represents an all-time high and will translate into $3.75 at the pump.

There are those who will say, “Why doesn’t the President do something?”

And I will say back: “He did do something. He gave us $100-a-barrel oil.” As recently as 2003 the price of a barrel was as low as $25. That was before George Bush’s energy (ha-ha) program kicked in. The good old days.

If, in 2001, you had laid out a plan to make oil cost $100-a-barrel by 2008, it would have been pretty much the plan that George Bush and his oil-field cronies executed.

First you fight all efforts---international and domestic---at energy conservation as though they were terrorist plots conceived in the mind of Osama bin Laden.

Then you go to war in the Middle East not once but twice to destabilize the world’s top oil-producing region and send oil prices shooting up. It has been said that as much as 30 percent of the price we’re paying for oil is due to the risk of that instability.

You also make sure to propose a series of half-hearted, too-little-too-late measures to develop alternative fuels, just so you can say you’ve done something.

And, of course, you keep trying to go where Man has not gone before. And drill for oil. Wilderness preserves are especially good. It is a pathetic response to the kind of shortfall we have in oil production, but it would make a few billion bucks for your oil industry buddies (the ones writing the big checks for speeches when your time in office is done).

Anyway, it’s worked. Congratulations George. And congratulations too to the American people, nearly half of whom voted Mr. Bush into office---twice. (If this is democracy I’m not so sure it’s a good idea to spread it to the rest of the world.)

The sorry fact is that advocating real energy conservation is a form of political suicide. People embrace conservation in the abstract, but when you get down to details, where it becomes painful and expensive, they act as though you’re trying to take away their birthright. And, in a sense, you are.

To the average American, conservation of energy is un-American. Our economy is based on consumption. Less is not more, less is less and bigger is better.

Consider the television set. It arrived in the world with the promise of being the greatest educational tool since the book. And instead we made it the greatest sales tool in the history of the world.

Think on that. A machine that can bring the entire world into your living room and instead we turn it over to lying hucksters selling junk.

The American public has swallowed the absurd notion that they are defined by the things they buy and consume. Happiness consists of owning the right combination of cars, hair products, clothes and soap.

They’ve bought the lie that they are consumers before they are workers. That’s why the labor movement is dying. Unions make things cost more. They protect jobs too, but we don’t think about that until it’s too late.

So to ask a society like ours to conserve, to do with less, not to buy, is ridiculous. I buy, therefore I am.

That’s why ideas like the $2-a-gallon gas tax will never fly. People don’t want to use less gasoline. They want to use more.

Which means, whether they know it or not, they want $120-a-barrel oil.

And they’re going to get it; good and hard.

MY FAVORITE POPULIST

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 21:49:18 GMT

WHY NOT HEALTHCARE FOR ALL? – by Jim Hightower

Sergio Olaya is a 21-year-old college student who has had to drop out of school because of our country's messed up health insurance system.

Actually, Olaya has health coverage, for he's a federal employee. But, his mother wasn't covered when she was suddenly hit with an aggressive cancer this year. She died, and her son is now grappling with $255,000 in medical bills for her treatment. The hospital has sicced its collection agency on him - so, to pay the bills, he had to quit college and is now selling the house where he and his mother lived.

Ironically, Mr. Olaya's job is in the U.S. Senate. He runs an elevator on which our honorable solons ride everyday. Senators share a ride with him, but they share none of the health-care anxieties and financial burdens that millions of Americans like Olaya carry. Members of Congress, you see, are fully covered by us taxpayers.

Well, gosh, if it's good enough for them, I'm sure it would be good enough for the rest of us. We don't want any special coverage - we'll be happy with what Congress gives itself.

Not all Senators are boneheads about this, and they're pushing bills to provide such universal coverage. Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio deserves special praise, for he is refusing to accept the Congressional coverage for himself, saying he won't take it until every American is covered.

Then there's presidential contender John Edwards, who has put a strong, universal health care plan at the center of his campaign. If elected, he intends not only to push his plan in Congress, but to couple it with a bill that would strip lawmakers of their own coverage if they fail to cover everyone else.

Edwards' proposal for universal coverage also includes a single-payer alternative to compete with profiteering insurance corporations. See it all at www.johnedwards.com/issues/health-care/.

TODAY'S TIMES

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 12:08:56 GMT

Is Ethanol for Everybody?
By ROGER COHEN

CAMPOS, Brazil

Near what remains of the first sugar factory in Brazil, built in 1877 with a sign in Latin over the entrance that translates as “Sweet is the Reward of Work,” Danuza Gomes da Silva swings a glinting knife as she makes her way down the length of a field cutting cane.

She bends to slice the sticks of young cane dropped by other workers from the top of a truck. Again and again she straightens. A band of 12 laborers like hers plants about 10 acres a day. Sugar cane buds easily from the plowed furrows, and it grows fast. But the work associated with it is hard.

Danuza, round-faced and soft-eyed, makes between $8 and $13 a day depending on her productivity. At 35, she has four young children. Only 20 percent of the 7.5 million acres planted with sugar cane in Brazil is mechanized. The rest depends on manual labor like hers.

“I don’t want to lose my job,” she says, a smile on her face, the oversized cleaver in her hand.

Machines that plant and harvest are slowly spreading across the expanse of Brazilian cane fields. But Danuza’s harsh existence is a reminder that behind the global buzz over Brazil’s cane-based ethanol production — the 21st century’s environment-friendly biofuel par excellence — lurk enduring social problems.

Ethanol, renewable and relatively clean, is lovely. The life of the migrant Brazilian rural worker, finite and hot, is not.

Seldom has a country seen an image makeover quite as radical as Brazil’s in recent years. From the unserious land of samba, slums, soccer and smoking rain forests, it has become the realm of ahead-of-the-curve ethanol production, flex-fuel cars running on any combination of ethanol and gasoline, and a biofuel revolution that could deliver the world from $100-a-barrel oil.

Where the world once saw Pelé and poverty, it now sees prescience: a country where 80 percent of new cars run on ethanol or gasoline, all gasoline contains close to 25 percent ethanol, and ethanol accounts for more than 40 percent of fuel consumption.

These numbers reveal new U.S. targets that might replace about one-sixth of gasoline consumption with ethanol by 2020 for what they are: belated and meager.

Brazil, in other words, was busy seeing tomorrow while America viewed it as mired in the past, a place too frivolous to be futuristic.

In fact, both images hold some truth. Brazil has led the way in demonstrating the potential of ethanol, has the land to expand the industry, uses sugar-based ethanol whose yield per hectare is eight times that of U.S. corn ethanol being developed at the cost of higher food prices and has shown the feasibility of a flex-fuel auto fleet.

But a day spent visiting cane production facilities of CBAA, a sugar and ethanol manufacturer, revealed the hardship from which these achievements were wrested.

A cane field opposite an area overrun by landless peasants had been burnt in an act of arson. A man searched forlornly for a horse he’d illegally left to feed in the cane plantations and then lost. Outside a makeshift dormitory for migrant workers, men were slumped under clothes hung to dry.

“The social situation is complicated,” said Aristóteles Ramos Cardoso, the director of a local CBAA sugar and ethanol factory. “We’re near the city. We need labor. There’s no shortage of criminals.”

If the vast potential of sugar cane ethanol is to be realized, in Brazil as in poor African countries, its development must come in ordered ways that allow the likes of Danuza and her children to benefit. A new fuel should not carry oil’s frequent curse: the enrichment of a narrow elite.

This will depend on several things: the labor standards adopted by the growing hordes of international investors drawn to ethanol; the opening up of the global trading system to this biofuel that many poor tropical countries will be able to produce; and the development of a global traded commodity market in ethanol with established norms.

Without such standards, development will stall. So will social progress.

“The United States could really generate wealth for those who need it, while freeing itself from oil dependence,” said José Pessoa, the chief executive of CBAA. “It should be buying my ethanol rather than imposing tariffs on it. It should be helping to develop the sugar-cane industry in Africa. This would be the intelligent way and best for the environment.”

Pessoa is right. America must do its part, not least by freeing up its ethanol and sugar markets to imports. So must Brazil, by seeing a 35-year-old woman in the sun with children in need of education, and all the myriad people like them, through the billowing CO2-lite clouds of ethanol euphoria.

TODAY'S TIMES

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:10:43 GMT

We Still Need the Big Guns

By CHARLES J. DUNLAP Jr.

THE relative calm that America’s armed forces have imposed on Iraq is certainly grounds for cautious optimism. But it also raises some obvious questions: how was it achieved and what does it mean for future defense planning?

Many analysts understandably attribute the success to our troops’ following the dictums of the Army’s lauded new counterinsurgency manual. While the manual is a vast improvement over its predecessors, it would be a huge mistake to take it as proof — as some in the press, academia and independent policy organizations have — that victory over insurgents is achievable by anything other than traditional military force.

Unfortunately, starry-eyed enthusiasts have misread the manual to say that defeating an insurgency is all about winning hearts and minds with teams of anthropologists, propagandists and civil-affairs officers armed with democracy-in-a-box kits and volleyball nets. They dismiss as passé killing or capturing insurgents.

Actually, the reality is quite different. The lesson of Iraq is that old-fashioned force works. Add 30,000 of the world’s finest infantry to the 135,000 battle-hardened troops already there, as we have done, and the outnumbered insurgency is in serious trouble. Detain thousands more Iraqis as security threats, and the potential for violence inevitably declines. Press reports indicate that the number of Iraqis in prison doubled over the last year, to 30,000 from 15,000; and while casualty figures are sketchy, military officials told USA Today last September that the number of insurgents killed was already 25 percent higher in 2007 than in all of 2006.

And while the new counterinsurgency doctrine has an anti-technology flavor that seems to discourage the use of air power especially, savvy ground-force commanders in Iraq got the right results last year by discounting those admonitions. Few Americans are likely to be aware that there was a fivefold increase in airstrikes during 2007 as compared with the previous year, which went hand in hand with the rest of the surge strategy. Going high-tech once again proved to be highly successful.

Regrettably, two other uncomfortable developments also helped suppress violence. First, the Iraqi population has largely segregated itself into sectarian fiefs. Second, supposedly “reformed” insurgents now dominate Anbar Province. While these Sunni partisans have for the moment sided with the United States, can we assume they’ve bought into the idea of a truly pluralistic and democratic Iraq?

Nonetheless, fans of the counterinsurgency manual are using it as a bludgeon against anyone who wants to plan to fight the next war rather than the last one. Their line of thinking holds that our next war will be a replay of Iraq, and thus most of our armed forces should be structured for counterinsurgency.

But this ignores other potential threats. Should we simply wish away China’s increasing muscle, or a resurgent Russia’s plans for a fifth-generation fighter that would surpass our top of the line jet, the F-22 stealth fighter? Moreover, does anyone really believe that creating corps of civil affairs officers will deter North Korea or Iran?

Yes, there is always the possibility that we may again find ourselves battling an insurgency, and the manual has many great ideas. Furthermore, the proposal for a 20,000-strong adviser corps to help Iraqi local forces fight insurgents ought to be green-lighted.

The problem emerges when we consider pouring excessive resources into preparing for only one kind of conflict. Doing so would put us at real risk of losing the technological superiority that has kept America’s vastly more dangerous threats at bay. Consider, for example, that our warplanes are on average more than 25 years old.

The enormous cost of the Iraq war, not to mention the loss of life on both sides, would seem to counsel against the idea of a similar operation elsewhere. Looking ahead, America needs a military centered not on occupying another country but on denying potential adversaries the ability to attack our interests. This is not a task for counterinsurgents, but rather for an unapologetically high-tech military that substitutes machines for the bodies of young Americans.

Charles J. Dunlap Jr. is an Air Force major general and the author of “Shortchanging the Joint Fight?,” an assessment of the Army’s counterinsurgency manual.

TODAY'S TIMES

Tue, 08 Jan 2008 12:06:40 GMT

Older Men (and Women) Trying Not to Be Angry
By ELEANOR RANDOLPH

Norman, Okla.

The bloggers, hardly the politest bunch, were calling the gathering of former and present officials on Monday at the University of Oklahoma the “Ben-Gay forum” — a nostalgia trip for oldies trying to creak their way back into electoral relevance.

Some of the more radical or wishful thinkers of the political crowd saw the session as something different: the possible beginning of a third party and another brick in the independent presidential bid by Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York.

Actually, it was neither.

It was more what David Boren, former senator from Oklahoma and now president of the university, called it: a gathering of 17 “outstanding public servants” who wanted to talk about more than Mr. Bloomberg’s supposed White House aspirations or a third party.

Call it idealism or a yearning for the past, but the participants wanted to talk about more than their legacies. They wanted to warn that “America is in danger” and urge the politicians of today to fulfill their basic obligations to the country, not the party or some sliver of an interest group or the lobbyist who forks over the most lucre.

And if some participants wanted to use the threat of an independent candidacy to get the attention of Republican and Democratic regulars, at this point that seems more a tactic than a solution.

Former Senator John Danforth, Republican of Missouri, told the enthusiastic crowd on Monday, the day before the New Hampshire primary, that each party has appealed too much to its “true believers” instead of appealing to the center. Former New Jersey Gov. Christie Todd Whitman said that it is up to voters to stop ceding ground to the fringes. Former Senator Chuck Robb, Democrat of Virginia, recalled, wistfully, meetings with Republican colleagues that aimed to find solutions to a big problem, not hunt for a “gotcha” to use against the other side.

For this group of political elders — two independents and the remainder split between the two parties — the fact that candidates in New Hampshire are chanting about change and Americans working together is just more evidence of the yearning out there to stop the narrow, divisive, expensive shenanigans in Washington.

This group wants the presidential hopefuls to offer specific ways to solve big problems like energy, health care and entitlements. They want candidates to promise “a truly bipartisan cabinet” and bipartisan working groups to talk about national defense, education and infrastructure.

Quixotic? Perhaps. It is easy to dismiss these lofty goals as impossible, even whimsical after eight years in which George W. Bush and Karl Rove devoted their political powers to dividing America on narrow emotional issues. But somebody should be saying what these veterans are saying. Congress does need to wear out carpet on the aisle between the two parties and thoughtful public leaders need to sit down in working groups to decide on the hard stuff instead of tearing each other apart on 24-hour television.

Before anyone, including these moderates, gives up on the two parties, it is worth thinking about what a third party could mean. A new independent party, with or without Mr. Bloomberg’s money, might siphon off moderate voters from the two main parties. If the independents did not succeed, which history suggests they would not, the main parties could wind up even more dominated by the screamers on both sides.

Right now, there is no third party and no candidate, just thoughtful people trying to get the political system to look at bigger ideas. In today’s political world, there is nothing wrong with that.

IT'S THE ECONOMY....stewpud !

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 20:39:24 GMT

From Hype to Fear

By Paul Krugman

The unemployment report on Friday was brutally bad. Unemployment rose in December, while job creation was minimal — and it’s highly likely, for technical reasons, that the job number will be revised down, showing an actual decline in employment.

It’s the latest piece of bad news about an economy in which the employment situation has actually been deteriorating for the past year. It’s no longer possible to hope that the effects of the housing slump will remain “contained,” as one of 2007’s buzzwords had it. The levees have been breached, and the repercussions of the housing crisis are spreading across the economy as a whole.

It’s not certain, even now, that we’ll have a formal recession, although given the news on Friday you have to say that the odds are that we will. But what is clear is that 2008 will be a troubled year for the U.S. economy — and that as a result, the overall economic record of the Bush years will have been dreary at best: two and a half years of slumping employment, three and a half years of good but not great growth, and two more years of renewed economic distress.

The November election will take place against that background of economic distress, which ought to be good news for candidates running on a platform of change.

But the opponents of change, those who want to keep the Bush legacy intact, are not without resources. In fact, they’ve already made their standard pivot when things turn bad — the pivot from hype to fear. And in case you haven’t noticed, they’re very, very good at the fear thing.

You see, for 30 years American politics has been dominated by a political movement practicing Robin-Hood-in-reverse, giving unto those that hath while taking from those who don’t. And one secret of that long domination has been a remarkable flexibility in economic debate. The policies never change — but the arguments for these policies turn on a dime.

When the economy is doing reasonably well, the debate is dominated by hype — by the claim that America’s prosperity is truly wondrous, and that conservative economic policies deserve all the credit.

But when things turn down, there is a seamless transition from “It’s morning in America! Hurray for tax cuts!” to “The economy is slumping! Raising taxes would be a disaster!”

Thus, until just the other day Bush administration officials were in denial about the economy’s problems. They were still insisting that the economy was strong, and touting the “Bush boom” — the improvement in the job situation that took place between the summer of 2003 and the end of 2006 — as proof of the efficacy of tax cuts.

But now, without ever acknowledging that maybe things weren’t that great after all, President Bush is warning that given the economy’s problems, “the worst thing the Congress could do is raise taxes on the American people and on American businesses.”

And even more dire warnings are coming from some of the Republican presidential candidates. For example, John McCain’s campaign Web site cautions darkly that “Entrepreneurs should not be taxed into submission. John McCain will make the Bush income and investment tax cuts permanent, keeping income tax rates at their current level and fighting the Democrats’ plans for a crippling tax increase in 2011.”

What “crippling” tax increase, which would tax entrepreneurs into submission, is Mr. McCain talking about? The answer is, proposals by Democrats to let the Bush tax cuts for people making more than $250,000 a year expire, returning upper-income tax rates to the levels that prevailed in the Clinton years.

And we all remember how little entrepreneurship there was, how weakly the economy performed, during the Clinton years, right? Oh, wait. (I’ve put some charts comparing job performance during the Clinton and Bush years on my Times blog, krugman.blogs.nytimes.com. It’s pretty startling how comparatively weak the Bush era looks.)

Never mind. The whole point of scare tactics is that they can work even in the face of inconvenient facts.

And what I’m not sure about is whether the Democrats are ready for the fight they’re about to face.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Barack Obama won his impressive victory in Iowa with a sunny, upbeat message of change.

But there’s a powerful political faction in this country that understands very well that any real change will create losers as well as winners. In particular, any serious progressive reform of health care, let alone a broader attempt to reduce middle-class insecurity and inequality, will have to mean higher taxes on the affluent. And members of that faction will do whatever it takes to scare people into believing that change means disaster for the economy.

I don’t think they’ll succeed. But it would be a big mistake to assume that they won’t.

TODAY'S TIMES

Mon, 07 Jan 2008 12:59:20 GMT

Stirred, Not Shaken

By MICHAEL KINSLEY

IF it’s a question of “experience” versus “change,” change will win every time. Hillary Clinton, of all people, should have known that. Doesn’t she remember 1992? That was when her husband made “change” his mantra and chanted it all the way to the White House. This year, Mrs. Clinton tried to suggest that Barack Obama does not have enough experience to be president. He hung her experience around her neck and chanted the change mantra himself.

An Obama presidency would, in fact, be a huge change in all sorts of obvious ways. Yet on the Republican side as well, there is talk of change. Of course it is trickier with a sitting Republican president. But that hasn’t stopped one of the candidates from seizing on the word and using it as the centerpiece of his campaign.

It’s not the candidate you would have guessed if you haven’t been listening to them: it’s Mitt Romney. Nothing better illustrates the mystical power of “change” in American politics, and its malleability, than its selection by the expensively engineered Romney machine, even though the word doesn’t seem to apply in any way to the man or his campaign.

It’s hard to say what Mr. Romney’s campaign is really about. He would clearly do or say anything or its opposite to become president. But, in general, he seems to be trying to make himself as conventional a Republican as possible, calling for tax cuts blah blah blah, supporting President Bush 100 percent on Iraq, shedding any aberrant views on abortion or gay rights that he may have picked up by accident in Massachusetts.

He radiates conventionality, with his “Leave-It-to-Beaver”-and-then-some family and his good looks straight out of “Mad Men,” the TV series about Madison Avenue in the early 1960s. (I was a few years behind Mr. Romney at a small private high school in Michigan. He graduated in 1965 and looks exactly the same now as he did back then.) If anything, his message ought to be stability: things do not have to change.

Mr. Romney’s actual mantra is “change in Washington,” but that is no more helpful in the logic department. He is not campaigning for Congress. Bragging that he will bring “change in Washington” is either a purposeful insult to a sitting president of his own party, or it means nothing at all. Clearly, it means nothing at all.

Of the two leading Republicans, it is Mike Huckabee who is the more obvious agent of change, for his party and the country, with his ambitious plans for destroying the economy with a national sales tax and his Democratic-sounding attacks on wealth and privilege. But Mr. Huckabee has let Mr. Romney steal the word from him.

The appeal of “change” as a cri de coeur is that it sounds dynamic without committing you to anything in particular. Any slogan shared by Barack Obama and Mitt Romney is going to be pretty meaningless. Not only can voters give it any meaning they wish, it can have different meanings for different voters.

Best of all, being the candidate of change in some vague and meaningless way gives you cover to come out for stasis in most of the particulars. Americans say they want change, and think they want it, but there is room for doubt. The candidates of real, serious change, like Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul, are going to be dropping like petals. And no wonder: they are scary. Change is scary.

What are the candidates actually promising? As often as not, it is protection from change. They will not muck around with your Social Security. They will make sure that you don’t lose your health insurance — and that you will always be able to keep your own doctor. The world is changing fast, but they will protect you from any dire effects. They won’t let the country get flooded with poisonous toys from China or workers from Mexico or (a Mike Huckabee offering) terrorists from Pakistan. A fence, that’s what we need. A fence to cower behind, to keep out change, or at least to slow it down.

There is nothing contemptible about a reluctance to change. Most of us have it pretty good in this country, and can’t be blamed for wanting things to stay that way. For that to happen, though, will require some wrenching changes. The list isn’t surprising, or really very long, compared with the list of our blessings. We need to use less energy and borrow less money. We need to fix our schools and reform our health care system. We need to end a stupid war.

Is this what people mean when they demand “change”? Are these things what the candidates have in mind when they promise to deliver it? If so, great. But all of these (except, maybe, ending the war) will require some changes that are unpleasant. We as a society have shown no tolerance for unpleasant changes, and politicians have shown no enthusiasm for trying to persuade us that they might be necessary.

If all you want is happy changes, you really don’t want change at all.

MinutemanMedia.org

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 16:01:47 GMT

IT’S NOT CALLED THE SILLY SEASON FOR NOTHING — by Donald Kaul

Once upon a time, not that long ago, I was an all-purpose political commentator, geysering opinions on world affairs, global warming, the price of oil. I was really something.

Now I just write about religion, mainly. Who’s Christian, who’s not. Who believes in God more; less.

God I’ll be glad when the Iowa Caucuses are over.

They used to be kind of fun, you know. They used to be about major issues of the day. I remember back in 1968 when Gene McCarthy challenged President Lyndon Johnson on the issue of the war in Vietnam. People almost came to blows in the caucus meetings that year.

Now you can’t even mention the war in candidate debates. Really. In the most recent debates the monitor, the editor of the newspaper formerly known as the Des Moines Register, actually forbade discussion of the war in Iraq. And the candidates, Democrats and Republicans alike, went along with the gag.

Instead of a boring old issue like the war she asked them, I’m told, what their New Year’s resolutions were. And they told her.

I haven’t checked, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Jefferson Memorial moved three inches off its foundation.

Mike Huckabee, the former Baptist preacher, seems to be winning the God game for the Republicans. The most recent polls put him at 35 percent, compared to 27 for Mitt Romney, the previous front-runner. Asked to account for that, Huckabee said:

“There’s only one explanation for it, and it’s not a human one. It’s the same power that helped a little boy with two fish and five loaves feed a crowd of 5,000”

Poor Mitt. He’s forced to spend his time convincing Iowa’s conservatives he’s more religious than that and, like any good Christian, that he hates illegal immigrants more than Huckabee does. But always he makes sure to say things like: “Most of us believe in God.”

“Marriage is between a man and a woman.”

To which smart aleck Huckabeephiles might say “…and a woman and a woman and a woman.” (I myself, by the way, would never make a joke like that. It is racist. It is sexist. It is Mormonist. I’m just reporting the news.)

Romney tried to gain an advantage by saying that Huckabee, when governor of Arkansas, issued more than 1000 pardons to convicted criminals.

Huckabee’s forces shot back by planting a scurrilous story that Mrs. Romney had given $150 to Planned Parenthood in 1994.

I’ll tell you, politics can be a dirty business.

John McCain, who is disappearing from the radar screen in Iowa, is left with issues like the mortgage crisis or the war (when debate monitors are out of the room) or even campaign finance. How he ever expects to get nominated talking about things like that I’ll never know.

The religious issue isn’t that big a deal in the Democratic contest in Iowa. Once you lay to rest the rumor that Barak Obama is a secret Moslem there’s not much there.

Democrats tend to argue about which of them is more electable. Hillary Clinton thinks she is because she’s spent time in the White House. Obama says he’s the one who can mend the frayed seams in the fabric of the party and, later, the nation. John Edwards says he’s got the best policy positions and Joe Biden claims to have the most expertise, Bill Richardson the most experience.

There’s some truth in all of those claims but you have to wonder whether anyone cares.

Looking at the Republican candidates, you would think that any of the Democrats would be electable. This is the weakest Republican field---in terms of credentials and experience---in memory. The only one among them who seems as though he could do the job without adult supervision is McCain and his party doesn’t like him much.

Still, that’s why they have elections, isn’t it?

I’ll just be happy to see the back end of the Iowa caucuses. I’m religioned out.

Lost your Home?....Blame Ayn Rand !

Fri, 21 Dec 2007 19:30:48 GMT

Blindly Into the Bubble

By PAUL KRUGMAN

When announcing Japan’s surrender in 1945, Emperor Hirohito famously explained his decision as follows: “The war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage.”

There was a definite Hirohito feel to the explanation Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, gave this week for the Fed’s locking-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-is-gone decision to modestly strengthen regulation of the mortgage industry: “Market discipline has in some cases broken down, and the incentives to follow prudent lending procedures have, at times, eroded.”

That’s quite an understatement. In fact, the explosion of “innovative” home lending that took place in the middle years of this decade was an unmitigated disaster.

But maybe Mr. Bernanke was afraid to be blunt about just how badly things went wrong. After all, straight talk would have amounted to a direct rebuke of his predecessor, Alan Greenspan, who ignored pleas to lock the barn door while the horse was still inside — that is, to regulate lending while it was booming, rather than after it had already collapsed.

I use the words “unmitigated disaster” advisedly.

Apologists for the mortgage industry claim, as Mr. Greenspan does in his new book, that “the benefits of broadened home ownership” justified the risks of unregulated lending.

But homeownership didn’t broaden. The great bulk of dubious subprime lending took place from 2004 to 2006 — yet homeownership rates are already back down to mid-2003 levels. With millions more foreclosures likely, it’s a good bet that homeownership will be lower at the Bush administration’s end than it was at the start.

Meanwhile, during the bubble years, the mortgage industry lured millions of people into borrowing more than they could afford, and simultaneously duped investors into investing vast sums in risky assets wrongly labeled AAA. Reasonable estimates suggest that more than 10 million American families will end up owing more than their homes are worth, and investors will suffer $400 billion or more in losses.

So where were the regulators as one of the greatest financial disasters since the Great Depression unfolded? They were blinded by ideology.

“Fed shrugged as subprime crisis spread,” was the headline on a New York Times report on the failure of regulators to regulate. This may have been a discreet dig at Mr. Greenspan’s history as a disciple of Ayn Rand, the high priestess of unfettered capitalism known for her novel “Atlas Shrugged.”

In a 1963 essay for Ms. Rand’s newsletter, Mr. Greenspan dismissed as a “collectivist” myth the idea that businessmen, left to their own devices, “would attempt to sell unsafe food and drugs, fraudulent securities, and shoddy buildings.” On the contrary, he declared, “it is in the self-interest of every businessman to have a reputation for honest dealings and a quality product.”

It’s no wonder, then, that he brushed off warnings about deceptive lending practices, including those of Edward M. Gramlich, a member of the Federal Reserve board. In Mr. Greenspan’s world, predatory lending — like attempts to sell consumers poison toys and tainted seafood — just doesn’t happen.

But Mr. Greenspan wasn’t the only top official who put ideology above public protection. Consider the press conference held on June 3, 2003 — just about the time subprime lending was starting to go wild — to announce a new initiative aimed at reducing the regulatory burden on banks. Representatives of four of the five government agencies responsible for financial supervision used tree shears to attack a stack of paper representing bank regulations. The fifth representative, James Gilleran of the Office of Thrift Supervision, wielded a chainsaw.

Also in attendance were representatives of financial industry trade associations, which had been lobbying for deregulation. As far as I can tell from press reports, there were no representatives of consumer interests on the scene.

Two months after that event the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, one of the tree-shears-wielding agencies, moved to exempt national banks from state regulations that protect consumers against predatory lending. If, say, New York State wanted to protect its own residents — well, sorry, that wasn’t allowed.

Of course, now that it has all gone bad, people with ties to the financial industry are rethinking their belief in the perfection of free markets. Mr. Greenspan has come out in favor of, yes, a government bailout. “Cash is available,” he says — meaning taxpayer money — “and we should use that in larger amounts, as is necessary, to solve the problems of the stress of this.”

Given the role of conservative ideology in the mortgage disaster, it’s puzzling that Democrats haven’t been more aggressive about making the disaster an issue for the 2008 election. They should be: It’s hard to imagine a more graphic demonstration of what’s wrong with their opponents’ economic beliefs.

***************************************************

I don't know about blame-saying and finger pointing. One thing I do know fer shur? "Atlas Shrugged" was one damned long novel. The story was entertaining enough, but DAMN AYN, GET TO THE FRIGGEN POINT!!!! SHEESH!!!! ~Tracy~

MinutemanMedia.org

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 20:20:23 GMT

THE THREE PHONY WARS OF GEORGE W. BUSH – by Frankie Sturm

Fall was supposed to be make or break time for President George W. Bush’s war policy. It hasn’t been. In September, the much-anticipated Petraeus Report was expected to tie up the loose ends of the Iraq war, demonstrating progress and providing new directions for policy. Instead, congressional doves and hawks alike climbed aboard the David Petraeus bandwagon, each camp claiming vindication. Consequently, an event that was billed as a pivotal moment in the Iraq debate has produced nothing but confusion and disagreement. Yet this should come as no surprise, for the Petraeus Report, like so many “turning points” before it, failed to clarify the fundamental reality of our presence in Iraq: It still doesn’t tell us what we’re doing there.

According to President Bush, we’re in Iraq to fight three wars at the same time. One of these wars is the war between democracy and dictatorship. According to the administration, the United States is taking up arms to overthrow tyrants and install democratic governments throughout the world. Granted, Saddam Hussein was a tyrant, and the United States overthrew him. However, the claim that President Bush’s America is systematically going after dictators in order to plant the seeds of democracy has little credibility beyond the echo chamber of the Oval Office Some of America’s most important allies -- Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Pakistan, etc. -- are profoundly antidemocratic. President Bush’s democracy-promotion argument for war is a false one.

The second war the Bush administration is trying to fight is the war between Sunni and Shiite Muslims. In this war, it is said that Mr. Bush is not picking a side so much as trying to reconcile the two major sects of Islam. However, this claim is obviously false, and even if it were true, it would be foolish. Both in and out of Iraq, President Bush has flip-flopped his support from Shiite to Sunni groups with haphazard inconsistency. Since both sides know that America might flip again, they have no reason to negotiate with one another. It is easier to wait and hope for Mr. Bush to change his mind.

That such a policy is foolish in the first place is clear from the fact that Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting each other for about 1,300 years. The notion that a few more years of George W. Bush would enable them to patch up all their differences and lead to a new dawn of peace in the Middle East is as ignorant as it is arrogant. If this imprudent course of action is the major justification for leaving American troops in Iraq — hoping they’ll provide security while Sunnis and Shiites provide a negotiated peace — we should begin withdrawing our forces as quickly as possible. The war for reconciliation then is also a false one.

The final war the Bush administration is leading is the so-called “War on Terrorism.” If this means capturing terrorists and preventing attacks, then it would be hard to complain. Unfortunately, the war on terror has had the unwelcome — though very anticipated — effect of discrediting moderate Islam and bolstering violent extremism. Our number one problem regarding terrorism is al Qaida, but in 2001 the Bush administration those not to hunt down Osama bin Laden and his supporters in Afghanistan.

The administration opted for Iraq instead. Consequently, there are more terrorists and terrorist attacks than when Mr. Bush first came into office. Curiously, his administration has also been protecting an anti-Iranian terrorist group called the MEK. A war on terrorism in which al Qaida is allowed to escape, and support is provided to terrorists, seems highly suspicious. In other words, Bush’s third wars also a false one.

The harsh reality is that the war in Iraq has little to do with democracy or terrorism, and everything to do with oil reserves and cash cows for government contractors. While this might be good for a small handful influential politicians and business leaders, it is certainly not good for national security. As the debate surrounding Iraq heats up with the impending presidential election, it’s essential that we, as Americans, get a better grasp of what our best interests are.

What’s clear is that President Bush, caught up in fanciful justifications of the war in Iraq, has utterly failed at hunting down the murderers who are responsible for 9/11, while simultaneously plunging the Middle East into chaos. In doing, so he has proven that he is softer on terror than he is on reality. We’d do well to remember that as we debate the future of his failed strategy in Iraq.

TODAY'S TIMES

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 13:43:42 GMT

A Crisis Long Foretold

A truism of crisis management is that most seemingly out-of-the-blue disasters could have been prevented if someone had paid attention.

An article in The Times on Tuesday by Edmund L. Andrews leaves no doubt that the twin crises of the subprime lending mess — mass foreclosures at one end of the economic scale and a credit squeeze afflicting the financial system — are rooted in the willful failure of federal regulators to heed numerous warnings.

The Federal Reserve is especially blameworthy. Starting as early as 2000, former Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan brushed aside warnings from another Fed governor, Edward M. Gramlich, about subprime lenders who were luring borrowers into risky loans. Mr. Greenspan’s insistence, to this day, that the Fed did not have the power to rein in such lending is nonsense.

In 1994, Congress passed a law requiring the Fed to regulate all mortgage lending. The language is crystal clear: the Fed “by regulation or order, shall prohibit acts or practices in connection with A) mortgage loans that the board finds to be unfair, deceptive, or designed to evade the provisions of this section; and B) refinancing of mortgage loans that the board finds to be associated with abusive lending practices, or that are otherwise not in the interest of the borrower.”

Yet, the Fed did nothing as junk lending proliferated — including loans that were unsustainable unless house prices rose in perpetuity, riddled with hidden fees and made to borrowers who could not repay. Mr. Greenspan has said that the law was too vague about the meaning of “unfair” and “deceptive” to warrant action.

The Fed has also disappointed since the current chairman, Ben Bernanke, took over in early 2006. It was not until the end of June 2007 — after the damage was done — that the Fed and other federal regulators issued official subprime guidance. On Tuesday, the Fed issued another set of proposals. Among those, subprime lenders would have to verify a borrower’s ability to repay and include mandatory tax and insurance costs in the monthly payment. In at least one key respect — enforcing the ability-to-repay standard — the proposal is weaker than earlier Fed guidance. Congress is considering other protections that are stronger in many ways.

When all the truth is out, the Fed will have company in the hall of shame. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, for example, blocked states from investigating local affiliates of national banks for abusive lending.

If the regulators had done their jobs, there might have been no lending boom and no extraordinary riches for the lenders and investors who profited from unfettered subprime lending. Neither would there be mass foreclosures, a credit crunch and a looming recession.

This crisis didn’t appear unexpectedly. And it won’t go quickly away. Congress and the next administration will have a lot of work ahead to clean up the subprime mess — once and for all.

MY FAVORITE POPULIST

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 19:33:57 GMT

KEEP YOUR CHIP OUT OF MY ARM – by Jim Hightower

Have you been chipped?

In another cabal of corporate and governmental officials, there's been a steady push during the past few years to authorize and market microchip devices to be implanted into humans. An outfit named VeriChip Corporation is the chief pusher, asserting that implanting one of its radio frequency ID chips into your upper arm can be a medical boon to you. These electronic capsules transmit a unique code, says VeriChip, and if something happens to you, hospital staff can run a scanner over your chip, get your code, and activate a database containing your medical history.

VeriChip envisions a market of at least 45 million Americans sporting their very own RFID codes. But – oops – one bit of info the corporation never mentioned to customers or federal regulators is that several studies have found that these implants have induced malignant tumors in lab mice and rats. As one eminent cancer expert said after reviewing these studies, "There's no way in the world that I would have one of those chips implanted in my skin, or in one of my family members."

Where were our so-called regulatory watchdogs? Too busy cheering on the chippers to ask tough questions about side effects. Tommy Thompson, the Bush appointee who oversaw the agency that approved VeriChip for use in humans, has been a vigorous promoter of such electronic medical technologies. Five months after Thompson resigned his cabinet position in 2005, guess where he went? Right – onto the board of directors of both VeriChip and its parent corporation, where he was paid $40,000 a year and given about a million dollars worth of stock.

Interestingly, while Thompson once told an interviewer that he would "absolutely" be willing to have a VeriChip implanted in his own arm, he never did. Maybe he felt that an injection of VeriChip cash would be better for his health.

TODAY'S TIMES

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 11:56:26 GMT

Plenty of Blame for Afghanistan

It was not a pretty sight: Defense Secretary Robert Gates, last week, accusing NATO allies of not doing nearly enough in Afghanistan. But beyond the finger-pointing, there is a much more serious issue. Unless the United States and Europe come up with a better strategy — and invest more money, attention and troops — the “good war” will go irretrievably bad.

One year after NATO took over all peacekeeping responsibilities (the United States still has 26,000 troops there), attacks by Taliban and Qaeda forces, including suicide bombings, are on the rise. Afghans are growing increasingly disillusioned both about their country’s government and its Western backers. Poppy production is also soaring as the Kabul government, Washington and Europe squabble over the best approach to eradication.

There is plenty of blame to go around. President Hamid Karzai and his government are weak. Pakistan, with Washington’s acquiescence, has not done enough to root out Al Qaeda along Afghanistan’s border. NATO has 28,000 troops on the ground, but member states seem to be losing their enthusiasm for the effort.

Urgent pleas for 3,500 more military trainers for Afghan security forces, 20 helicopters and 3 infantry battalions have gone unanswered. British, Canadian, Australian and Dutch troops are fighting in southern Afghanistan, where insurgents are most active. But some European countries have placed so many restrictions on where and how their forces will operate — including barring deployments in the south — that they are hobbling the effort. France, Germany, Italy and Spain are among those that could do more.

One of the biggest problems is that when NATO took command in Afghanistan, many members expected that most of the fighting would be over and their troops would focus on development and stabilization. Instead, they are increasingly taking casualties, and European leaders have still failed to tell their citizens why Afghanistan matters — and why a major effort must be made to deny the Taliban and Al Qaeda a safe haven.

We understand Mr. Gates’s frustration. He might do better with the Europeans if he told another truth: Before NATO got involved, Washington never had enough troops in Afghanistan, nor did it have a coherent strategy for stabilizing and developing the country. Its decision to invade Iraq ended up shortchanging the effort even more. Too few ground troops, meanwhile, meant too much reliance on airstrikes, leading to too many civilian casualties, which fanned popular anger and resistance.

By the end of last week, Mr. Gates and European officials agreed that instead of trading blame they would begin a much needed top-to-bottom review of their strategy. Better late than never. The review must look at everything: politics, development, counternarcotics and security. It must find ways to improve coordination between NATO, Washington and Kabul. It must acknowledge that European and American troops will most likely have to remain there for many years. And it must be done quickly, before Afghanistan unravels even more.

MinutemanMedia.org

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 20:42:03 GMT

MIDDLE EAST TALKS – THE NEW FIASCO – by Donald Kaul

Last week George W. Bush, who is---and this will make you laugh---President of the United States, finally involved himself in the Middle East Peace Process (or MEPP, as some of us call it).

After seven years of benign neglect, Mr. Bush met with delegations from 46 interested countries and organizations at the Naval Academy in Annapolis.

His intent, he said, was “to facilitate” a meeting of minds between Israeli and Palestinian leaders.

I have this to say about that: Can we stop him before it’s too late?

George Bush knows diddly-squat about the Middle East and even less about peace. (Who but Bush would convene a peace conference at a military academy?)

He’s got a track record here, folks, and it’s not a good one. He invaded Afghanistan, which went pretty well…until he turned away from the job of fighting al Qaida in order to invade Iraq, which hasn’t gone so well.

The MEPP is a minefield for even the most sophisticated players, honeycombed with traps, ambushes and dead-ends. MEPP people talk in code. If you say you’re going to be “even-handed” in your dealings with Israelis and Palestinians, that means you’re against Israel and probably an anti-Semite. Don’t ask why, that’s just the way it is.

That’s way too complex for George Bush. Bush’s idea of peace is to bomb a country until it surrenders. So far the bombing part is working out better than the surrender part.

I know what you’re going to say, you people who read the “National Review” cover to cover:

Don’t be so quick to dismiss our efforts in Iraq. The Surge seems to be working, just as George Bush said it would. Violence in Baghdad and is down; fewer American troops are being killed and maimed.

OK, violence is down. What did you expect? You put a soldier with a gun on every corner and violence is going to go down. Markets will open; people will be more cheerful.

But less violence is no more than a pre-condition for the success of the Surge. Real success would be if the warring factions of the country used the hiatus in violence to achieve political accommodation. And that’s not happening.

Who am I to make such a judgment?

Fair question. Admittedly, I am no expert on the Middle East. Never been there. Before the war, I didn’t know the difference between a Sunni Muslim and Sonny Bono. In fact, if you gave me a blank map of the Middle East right now I couldn’t fill in the names of the countries.

Yet, despite that handicap, I was right about this war from the beginning, which is more than a lot of Middle East experts can say.

I ran across an old column the other day, written just after Secretary of State Colin Powell delivered his case for the war to the United Nations.

Powell convinced me that Saddam was a bad guy who meant us harm and was in violation of the U.N. sanctions imposed on him after the first Gulf war. He even convinced me (much to my embarrassment today) that Saddam was stockpiling weapons of mass destruction. However, I wrote:

“What I doubt is the immediacy of the threat he presents to us and, most importantly, why war is the best way to meet that threat.”

I went on to write:

“War is always a hideous thing and this one promises to be a particularly ugly one….the world’s television screens will be filled with images of dead and dying, many of them women and children, as well as scenes of wretched refugees streaming in hordes from American bombs. And each picture will be a recruiting poster for al Qaida, the Muslim terrorist organization.”

That’s not a perfect forecast of the way things worked out, but it’s in the ballpark. Closer than George Bush’s experts came, anyway. That’s why, maybe, you should listen to me when I say:

The Surge working? Bush involving himself in MEPP? Beware.

TODAY'S TIMES

Mon, 10 Dec 2007 14:01:10 GMT

Showdown in Arizona, Where Mariachis and Minutemen Collide

By LAWRENCE DOWNES

PHOENIX

Want to see America unraveling? Come here, to Thomas Road and 35th Street, to M. D. Pruitt’s furniture store. Come on Saturday morning and stand near the eight delivery trucks barricading the parking lot, like the wall of an urban Alamo.

For the last seven weeks, a sidewalk protest here by Latino immigrants has blossomed into a feverish reality show, attracting Minutemen, mariachis, children dancing in Mexican folk costume, white racists, United Nations observers, Phoenix police officers and Maricopa County sheriff’s deputies.

The weekly confrontation — strident and stalemated — perfectly mimics the national debate. But it’s a sideshow to something uglier: what happens when immigration’s complexities are handed to local law enforcers sympathetic to the fury of one side.

Thomas Road has lots of Latino day laborers, or jornaleros, who hustle for work near Home Depot. A few months ago, the Phoenix police shooed them away. They dispersed to streets nearby, angering local businesses. One of the biggest, Pruitt’s, hired off-duty city police officers to keep jornaleros at bay. The city put a stop to that, so Pruitt’s turned to the county sheriff, Joe Arpaio.

Sheriff Joe, as he is known, needed no prodding: hunting undocumented immigrants is his specialty. He has arrested hundreds under a state antismuggling law (for smuggling themselves) and has had 160 officers deputized as federal immigration agents. They have made more than 50 arrests near Pruitt’s since the protests began.

They’ll pull a car over for a traffic infraction, then check everyone’s papers. They say they act on reasonable suspicion only — if they see a shirt or shoes like those worn south of the border or hear Spanish. They say it isn’t profiling.

There is no doubt whose side Sheriff Joe is on. He has officers on Pruitt’s payroll, guarding the lot on protest days. Last week, he issued a news release demanding that the demonstrators stop hurting Pruitt’s and vowing to crank up the pressure until they went away. It was a naked attempt to stifle dissent and help a business ally.

People here are used to that from Sheriff Joe. He describes himself as “America’s meanest sheriff” and has recently been basking in the love of nativists like the Minuteman Chris Simcox and radio host Terry Anderson, who gushed over him at a roast in Sun City West this month.

If Arizona begins punishing companies that hire illegal workers under a law that takes effect Jan. 1 — a lawsuit to block it was thrown out Friday — it will fall to counties to do the purge. In Maricopa, that means Sheriff Joe.

The protests at Pruitt’s are the only real opposition he has faced. Their leader is Salvador Reza, a stocky American of Mexican and Apache ancestry, an Air Force veteran who has spent years organizing jornaleros and small-business owners here.

Mr. Reza says he can’t understand why America accepts global flows of companies, money and jobs but not workers. Why faith in market forces seems to have been eclipsed by fear of immigrants. Or why the country cannot set up legal channels to let jornaleros come and go and not be hassled.“They actually are people with a work ethic that would make the Puritans proud,” he said.

Pruitt’s owner, Roger Sensing, says he needs armed officers to protect customers from jornaleros. Mr. Reza calls that ridiculous, and one informed noncombatant, the Rev. Craig Geiger, pastor of a Lutheran church across the street, agrees. He told me he had never seen a laborer enter Pruitt’s lot. He also said his Latino congregation did not drive to church anymore. Documented or not, they fear Sheriff Joe. They walk.

Pastor Geiger leaves the neighborhood on Saturdays, because it gets deafening. When I was there, a trio singing Mexican ballads strolled through the crush. A Minuteman with a bullhorn followed them. “Monkeys coming through!” he shouted. His side rushed up to drown the music out: “Born in the U.S.A.! Born in the U.S.A.! K.K.K.! Viva la Migra! January First!”

The restrictionists see Jan. 1 as the dawn of a new era, when the Mexicans disappear and everything gets pure and legal again. It is uncertain whether Arizona’s economy will survive the exodus. “Unfortunately, they’ll probably wake up when they bankrupt the state,” Mr. Reza told me.

For a slide show and further commentary on what’s happening in Phoenix, go to nytimes.com/opinion.

MY FAVORITE POPULIST

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 14:53:46 GMT

IT’S NO PICNIC BEING RICH – by Jim Hightower

Time for another peek [lifestyle theme] into the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Cranky."

Those of us in the riff-raff class rarely realize how hard life is for the rich. I don't mean the merely rich, but the richy-rich - the billionaire class. Yes, if you're one of them, you've got half a dozen luxurious houses around the world, servants galore, private jets and helicopters, your own chef, and. well, anything you want. But what if you don't "make it?"

The "it" is the list, the annual “Forbes” magazine list of the 400 richest Americans. This is the ultimate social register, the measure of whether your wealth is really "wow" or just common. Well, this year's list has come out, and even being a billionaire no longer assures you of making the cut. In fact, being at the very bottom of the list, the 400th richest American, now requires $1.3 billion in wealth. This means that 82 certified American billionaires failed to qualify. How embarrassing is that? You can practically feel their pain, can't you?

Part of the problem for run-of-the-mill billionaires is that a horde of Wall Street speculators have recently zoomed to a level of über-wealth, thanks to the unregulated schemes of hedge-fund managers and private equity executives. Of the 45 newcomers to this year's “Forbes” list, half made their bundles in such schemes. With these operators pocketing billions of bucks, such regulars as the honcho of Starbucks and an heiress to the Campbell Soup fortune were bumped right off the “Forbes” list. See. It's a cruel world.

Interestingly, these high-flying Wall Streeters have been lobbying furiously in Washington to stave off any regulation of their financial flim-flammery and, especially, to forestall efforts to tax their pots of gold. After all, if they are regulated and taxed, even at the low level of other billionaires. They are not likely to make next year's list.

TODAY'S TIMES

Thu, 06 Dec 2007 13:17:23 GMT

The President’s Cynical Budget War

President Bush’s lame-duck attempt to repair the Republican Party’s threadbare fiscal reputation is an increasingly reckless game. In the latest exercise of irresponsibility for political gain, Mr. Bush reportedly wants to slash counterterrorism funding for front-line police and firefighters.

The administration’s own Homeland Security agency requested $3.2 billion for this first responder aid to high-risk cities and states in the 2009 budget — the one that Mr. Bush’s successor will inherit. The White House is considering cutting that request by more than half to $1.4 billion by eliminating grants for port and public transit security, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

While Mr. Bush wrestles with more responsible members of his own administration, his larger and more immediate game is to portray the narrow Democratic majority in Congress as feckless overspenders.

In October, he vetoed a sensible bill that would have provided health insurance for millions of uninsured children. In the name of faux fiscal discipline, he is threatening to veto budget measures that the nation needs for effective government.

Mr. Bush is clearly hoping that the public will somehow forget that he is the one who spent the last seven years running up huge deficits and debt with his off-the-books war in Iraq and serial tax cuts customized for his affluent political base. Mr. Bush’s Republican allies on Capitol Hill are also hoping that the voters will forget how they abetted the president through all those years. Those fiscal turncoats are now scrambling to pose once more as budget hawks to survive in next year’s watershed election.

The differences between the Democrats’ spending bills and Mr. Bush’s budget are not that large. And the Democrats are offering to split the difference. But Mr. Bush isn’t interested in compromise.

He’s decided the real political traction comes with manufactured standoffs and blame-the-Congress gridlock. And he clearly doesn’t care who suffers — the nation’s vulnerable cities or vulnerable children without health insurance.

As the White House plays out its cyncial scenario, loyalists are flinching.

“This isn’t a bridge to nowhere. We’re talking about life and death,” Representative Peter King of New York, the top Republican on the House’s Homeland Security Committee, warned of first-responder cuts. Having played along so far with the grand Bush strategy, Mr. King is alarmed now and threatening to vote against sustaining future vetoes.

Republicans sweating political survival beyond Mr. Bush’s desperate endgame would be wise to follow Mr. King’s lead, not the president’s.

Friedman One-Ups Dowd

Wed, 05 Dec 2007 15:44:32 GMT

I really don't wanna believe our preznut is so dense. I had a hard time believing it when I heard his press conference. His reasoning sumpin' like this: "The fact that they quit makes them more dangerous, Why? Because they can start up anytime!" SHEESH !

Further reasoning: "In the future they could have the knowledge and technology to build a bomb."

Isn't that true of every nation in existence?

~Tracy

Intercepting Iran’s Take on America

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

There are two intelligence analyses that are relevant to the balance of power between the U.S. and Iran — one is the latest U.S. assessment of Iran, which certainly gave a much more complex view of what is happening there. The other is the Iranian National Intelligence Estimate of America, which — my guess — would read something like this:

To: President Ahmadinejad

From: The Iranian Ministry of Intelligence

Subject: America

As you’ll recall, in the wake of 9/11, we were extremely concerned that the U.S. would develop a covert program to end its addiction to oil, which would be the greatest threat to Iranian national security. In fact, after Bush’s 2006 State of the Union, in which he decried America’s oil addiction, we had “high confidence” that a comprehensive U.S. clean energy policy would emerge. We were wrong.

Our fears that the U.S. was engaged in a covert “Manhattan Project” to achieve energy independence have been “assuaged.” America’s Manhattan Project turns out to be largely confined to the production of corn ethanol in Iowa, which, our analysts have confirmed from cellphone intercepts between lobbyists and Congressmen, is nothing more than a multibillion-dollar payoff to big Iowa farmers and agro-businesses.

True, thanks to Nancy Pelosi, the U.S. Congress decided to increase the miles per gallon required of U.S. car fleets by the year 2020 — which took us by surprise — but we nevertheless “strongly believe” this will not lead to any definitive breaking of America’s oil addiction, since none of the leading presidential candidates has offered an energy policy that would include a tax on oil or carbon that could trigger a truly transformational shift in America away from fossil fuels.

Therefore, it is “very likely” that Iran’s current level of high oil revenues will last for decades and insulate our regime from any decisive pressures from abroad or from our own people.

We have to note that obtaining open-source intelligence in America has become more difficult, because traditional news shows have become more comedic and more comedic news shows more authoritative.

For instance, CNN’s nightly business report is hosted by a man named “Dobbs.” Real journalists come on his show and present transparently propagandistic stories about immigration and trade and then he fulminates about them, much the way our ayatollahs used to do about “Satanic Americans” on late-night Iranian TV. So viewers have no real idea what’s happening in the U.S. economy.

Meanwhile, at 11 p.m., something called “The Daily Show,” which appears on Comedy Central, has fake journalists presenting what turns out to be the real news.

Yes, our last I.N.I.E. in 1990 concluded that after the collapse of communism, America was on track to become the world’s sole superpower and most compelling role model for Muslim youth — including our own. We were wrong. We now have “high confidence” that America is on a path of self-destruction, for three reasons:

First, 9/11 has made America afraid and therefore stupid. The “war on terrorism” is now so deeply imbedded in America’s psyche that we think it is “highly likely” that America will continue to export more fear than hope and will continue to defend things like torture and Guantánamo Bay prison and to favor politicians like Mr. Giuliani, who alienates the rest of the world.

Second, at a time when America’s bridges, roads, airports and Internet bandwidth have fallen behind other industrial powers, including China, we believe that the U.S. opposition to higher taxes — and the fact that the primary campaigns have focused largely on gay marriage, flag-burning and whether the Christian Bible is the literal truth — means it is “highly unlikely” that America will arrest its decline.

Third, all the U.S. presidential candidates are distancing themselves from the core values that made America such a great power and so different from us — in particular America’s long commitment to free trade, open immigration and a reverence for scientific enquiry wherever it leads. Our intel analysts are baffled that the leading Democrat, Mrs. Clinton, no longer believes in globalization and the leading Republican, Mr. Huckabee, never believed in evolution.

U.S. politicians seem determined to appeal either to the most nativist extremes in their respective parties — or to tell voters that something Americans call “the tooth fairy” will make their energy, budget, educational and Social Security deficits painlessly disappear.

Therefore, we conclude with “high confidence” that there is little likelihood that post-9/11 America will, as they say, “get its groove back” anytime soon.

Who needs nukes when you have this kind of America?

God is Great. Long Live the Iranian Revolution.