The Next Hurrah

The Most Damning News that Won't Make Your Local News

by emptywheel

The Senate Dems just held a hearing on pre-war intelligence, an attempt to make up for the fact that Pat Roberts has all but cancelled the Phase II investigation. As witnesses they had:

• Carl Ford ("John Bolton is a Kiss Ass Kick Down Kind of Guy" and former head of INR) [Bolton comment corrected per jonnybutter--got my ass kissing and my down kicking confused]
• Larry Wilkerson (Powell's Chief of Staff and the guy who put together Powell's UN speech)
• Wayne White (INR's principal Iraq analyst)
• Paul Pillar (who worked at the NIO and told Bush Iraq didn't have nukes)
• Joseph Cirincione (former intell)
• Michael Smith (Downing Street Memo reporter)
• Rod Barton (who wasn't allowed to discredit the mobile weapons labs)

(Thanks to Kagro X for making me go broke by watching it)

Anyway, the real fireworks were sparked, twice, by Congressman Walter Jones, who joined the Senate Dems in asking questions.

First, Jones asked how OSP had been able to hijack the intelligence and bring us to war. Larry Wilkerson answered, "The Vice President."

Then, Jones asked Joseph Cirincione if the law had been broken. Quoting from Ellicatt:

[Jones]: Do you feel the law was broken?  Congress was responsible for sending troops to Iraq.  Do you feel that down the road it could be seen as proven?

[Cirincione]:  As deeply flawed as it is, most of it was done legally, they won the policy battles.  The question now is in the coverup; are they telling the truth about their roles? These are the landmines; if congress persues this and tries to find the truth of what went wrong, you will get into criminal areas and coverup.

Well, hopefully CSPAN will replay the hearing so maybe ten more people will see this clear indictment of, as Wilkerson said, The Vice President.

Speaking from Cancer

by emptywheel

Update: Here's Murray's own take.

It almost seems like Howie didn't have the heart to do it, to insinuate that Murray Waas' past struggles with cancer influence his current reporting. But true to his smarmy self, Howie musters up several suggestions that the cancer has compromised Murray's reporting.

For a reporter whose specialty is digging out secrets, Murray Waas has been keeping one about himself for a long time.

[snip]

It's hard to say where the line should be drawn when it comes to such an intensely personal disclosure. Did Waas's near-death experience, and subsequent complications, affect his journalism? How could such a searing experience not change your outlook on work and life?

[snip]

Waas acknowledges that the disease influenced him in the late 1980s when he was writing for the Boston Globe about the collapse of Florida health care facilities where some cancer patients had died. "I wrote that as someone who my family and doctors thought was certainly going to die from cancer," he says. "Is it relevant to my work when I report on national security, foreign policy or politics? I don't think so."

But the lines are not so easily drawn. In one of several conversations, Waas says his near-death experience made him more determined to report on how the country got into both Persian Gulf wars, with their life-and-death stakes. After watching on Capitol Hill when the Gulf War resolution was approved in 1991, Waas interviewed two men at the Vietnam War Memorial who said two of their friends had died in that war and questioned why the United States was getting into another one. He saw in this "the mirror image of my own life" -- the unresolved questions about why his cancer was missed -- and vowed to fully investigate the war.

As someone who has a pretty good understanding of where Murray's coming from, let me just tell Howie to fuck off.

Anatomy of a White House Smear, 3.6

by emptywheel

(Previous parts 3.1 | 3.2 | 3.3 | 3.4 | 3.5)

In my last installment of this series, I showed the excuses journalists used so they wouldn't have to testify--ranging from claiming the First Amendment covered cocktail parties, to only asking for a waiver from the sources you couldn't damage, to refusing a waiver if you could do damage. In the culture of access, the journalists proved very unwilling to testify, even if they were asked to testify about something that had nothing to do with reporting on a story.

In this post, I'll look at how Rove and Libby capitalized on the culture of access journalism in several ways. They received near-stenographic treatment of their views from some writers. With some of their stenographers and others, they appear to have created a red herring to draw pressure away from themselves. There were the amazing stories of Bob Woodward and Viveca Novak, who sat on stories of their own involvement. And they appear to have used the press to try to coach testimony.

Minimum Wage = Minimal Decency

By Mimikatz

Once again last week the GOP reaffirmed its commitment to family values and decency by voting down a Democratic effort to increase the Minimum Wage.  In the Senate 8 Republicans joined Democrats in a 52-46 vote to cut off debate, with  60 votes required to proceed to a vote.   Currently $5.15, or $10,712 per year, the U.S. minimum wage has not been increased since 1998.  During that time period, Congress has increased its own pay by $35,000.  The increases to congressional pay are thus more than 3 times the minimum wage; Congress pays itself over fifteen times the minimum wage.

Meanwhile, the purchasing power of the minimum wage has hit a 51-year low.  The high point was forty years ago, when the minimum wage was worth almost twice what it is worth now.  Of course, in those days the average CEO made 25 times what the average worker made, while now CEO pay averages  a whopping 262 times the average worker’s pay.   While 21 states have higher minimum wages, an increase would benefit an estimated 7.3 million workers, three quarters of whim are adults over 20, and disproportionately women and minorities and their families.  The increase would also help the 8.2 million workers making just over the minimum in order to keep wage parity.   Ironically, the Senate defeated and the House refused to vote on increasing the minimum wage at a time when opinion polls show that an all-time high 83% of Americans support increasing the minimum wage by $2.00, nearly half of them strongly supporting such a move.  And rightly so, since recent studies on the impact of state minimum wage increases showed no or very minimal loss of jobs.  Moreover, the public, unlike the GOP, understands that this is an issue of fairness and decency.

Making it quite explicit where their priorities lie, the House GOP leadership, in their unending effort to give the already-have-mores a whole lot more, also found time last week to serve notice that while they are abandoning, for now, the attempt to repeal the Estate Tax, their non-negotiable substitute measure would exempt from the tax estates up to $5 million per individual ($10 million per couple), tax the amount between $5 million and $25 million at the capital gains tax rate (15%, rising to 20% in 2011) and the amount over $25 million at twice the capital gains rate.  Currently, the estate tax rate is 45% of the amount over $2 million per person or $4 million per couple.

The Democrats plan to make increasing the minimum wage a cornerstone of their agenda.  While increasing the minimum wage would modestly improve the lives of millions of workers at the bottom of the scale, the estate tax reductions benefit only .1% of the population, but benefit them handsomely, in the tens of millions of dollars and up into the billions.   Anyone who seeks to understand our rising income inequality need look no farther than these two measures to see that it is an artifact of policy choices, not an accident or the work of "the market."  And for anyone who wants to see this picture change, no issue could more dramatically highlight the differences between the two parties.

GWOT, an Assessment

by emptywheel

Best as I understand it, these are the main features of George Bush's GWOT thus far.

• Stings that net terrorist arrests of people whose sole affiliation is only ever with fictional terrorists the FBI creates
• Widespread domestic and international surveillance--of our phone calls, email, peaceful assembly, and bank records--that has never been definitively connected to any worthwhile arrest
• Torture-based arrests and long-term incarceration of people loosely affiliated with real terrorists
• A half-hearted war in Afghanistan that has done little to eliminate the underlying threat
• A pointless destabilizing war unrelated to terrorism

Flu Stories: WHO Acknowledges H2H2H

One of the odd things about being on the cutting edge is that when you hear of confirmation of something you've known for weeks, it seems anti-climactic. But, since there have been doubters, best to post the news as it stands.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has detailed the first evidence that a person likely caught the bird-flu virus from a human and passed a slightly mutated version to another person. But experts said Friday the genetic change does not increase the threat of a pandemic. The investigation said the mutation of the H5N1 strain of the virus occurred in a 10-year-old Indonesian boy on Sumatra island who was part of the largest cluster ever reported. The initial human case is thought to have been infected by poultry. She then likely passed it to the boy and four blood relatives. The boy is then thought to have infected his father, whose samples showed the same mutation, according to the report obtained by The Associated Press. Only one infected family member survived.

This is not the first H2H case, it's the first H2H2H cluster iopenly acknowledged by WHO. There may have been others in Turkey and Azerbaijan, and some of them almost certainly were H2H (WHO also acknowledges that Indonesia cluster is not the only H2H case known). And if one looks at the chart of ongoing human cases, it's obvious to even casual inspection that the problem is far from over.

Did BushCo Do Something Smart?

by emptywheel

I admit, the chances are very very small. But I have to say, when I read about the draft National Reconciliation plan floated by Prime Minister al-Maliki, I wondered if Bush had snuck over to Iraq to discuss precisely this plan. As Kevin Drum points out,

President Bush would be flatly insane to turn this opportunity down.  It's precisely the kind of request he needs in order to declare victory, assure everyone that the job is close to done, and make it clear that he respects Iraqi sovereignty and doesn't plan to occupy their country forever. There would be no loss of face and no loss of national honor.

This offers Bush a way out of the catastrophe and the hawkish bravado he has committed to. It'd give him a way to cut and run without paying the political costs  with the base of cutting and running. And what better way to negotiate the end of the NeoCon plan for world domination than by sneaking off in the middle of the night, where Dick can't override your decisions? Not to mention, this administration firmly believes in having these kinds of conversations in person.

The 4th Amendment: I've got good news, and I've got bad news.

by Kagro X

First, the good news: out in Portland, Oregon, a federal judge is finally being asked, head-on, to exclude as fatally tainted evidence collected by the NSA's illegal domestic surveillance program. And if the track record of the legal theory under which the exclusion is being sought is any indication, it's a sure bet that the evidence is out!

So what's the bad news?

The Next Open Thread

by DemFromCT

Who could forget this classic Onion from 2004? It's so fitting for 2006.

Poll: Many Americans Still Unsure Whom To Vote Against

According to the poll, 46 percent of the registered voters surveyed would vote against Bush if the election were held tomorrow, while 45 percent said they were ready to vote against Kerry. Factoring in the 2 percent margin of error, the two candidates are essentially deadlocked in the race to determine which candidate America doesn't support.

Researcher Jack Harmon, an analyst for the independent Beltway think tank the Dewey-Markham Institute, said these undecided Americans will be crucial in deciding the next election.

Harmon said voters are conflicted, wanting to cast environmental and antiwar votes against Bush, but wishing also to oppose Kerry's position on taxation.

"The two major parties face a tough struggle," Harmon said. "As the election approaches, both must convince undecided voters that the opposing party's candidate is worse than their own. As both parties take more moderate positions in an election year, it's getting harder to convince citizens that there's a reason to get out there and vote against anyone."

What's on your mind today?

 

So What's Wrong With Doubling The NSF Budget, Anyway?

by emptypockets

After overseeing the first NIH budget cut since the Nixon administration, President George Bush claims to be a proponent of basic research:

So I'm going to work with these two Congressmen to pass what we've called the American Competitive [sic] Initiative, which says that we will be the most -- we'll lead the world when it comes to research and development. The federal government should double its commitment to basic research in physical sciences over the next 10 years. People say, why would the federal government be investing? Well, I'll give you why -- the Internet. The Internet came to be because of federal research dollars. iPods -- got one? I got one, you know? (Laughter.) As a result of federal research.

The American Competitiveness Initiative, announced in this year's State of the Union address, includes a declaration by the President to double funding for the National Science Foundation. (And yes the iPod thing is in the official document that your government wrote to explain "science" to Americans.)

A serious long-term commitment to funding basic research would be wonderful. It would help America's economy, help secure our place of leadership in the world, and help to fuel a positive American philosophy about our future. Unfortunately, President Bush and his Republican Congress have simpler goals: to provide themselves with political cover during the midterm elections as pro-science, while they continue to starve out American research.