Haggard and the White House: Both Living in Denial
by Arianna Huffington

Let's face it: the Bush administration is sick. The fall of Ted Haggard is just the latest manifestation of the central disease of President Bush and his cohorts: the pathological refusal to accept reality, and the delusion that reality can be changed by rhetoric.

As Andrew Sullivan said last week on CNN, "this is not an election anymore, it's an intervention."
But while it's the administration that's sick, it's the whole country that's suffering.

How many more examples of this disease do we need? The insurgency is in its "last throes," we've "turned the corner" in Iraq, gutting Social Security would "save" it, global warming doesn't exist, evolution is just "a theory," Rumsfeld and Cheney are "doing a fantastic job" etc., etc., etc.

Mark Foley and Ted Haggard are textbook examples of how the relentless denial of reality perverts judgment and rots the soul. Same with the Bushies.

Was Ted Haggard's absurd claim this week that, yes, he saw Mike Jones, but only for massages and that, yes, he bought meth from Jones but never used it, really that different from Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld continuing to claim we're winning in Iraq?

That both the Reverend's and the administration's claims were made with the expectation that the public would buy them shows what the chronic refusal to acknowledge reality does to one's judgment.

I have little doubt that Haggard's homophobia was real (seen here in a particularly creepy clip), and that his desire to not be gay was real too. But facts are stubborn things. Instead of accepting those facts, Haggard chose to deny them, suppress them, and attack those who exposed them.

Sound like a familiar M.O.? Just before the Haggard hit the fan, the New York Times broke the story about a classified briefing that included a PowerPoint slide, prepared by U.S. Central Command, showing that Iraq was edging closer to "chaos." It's not like that's something the entire world didn't already know. But what was Rumsfeld's response? To start an investigation into who leaked the document.

Doesn't the public have the right to know how close Iraq is to chaos? If Rumsfeld were summoned to Capitol Hill and asked if Iraq were closer or farther to chaos than a year ago, would he lie? I guess we have to assume he would, since, to Rumsfeld, to tell the truth would be giving away "classified" information.

But the larger point is this: it ultimately doesn't matter if Rummy would fess up or not, because facts are facts. That Iraq is in chaos is a fact, and no amount of denying or spinning will change that any more than Ted Haggard's gay bashing will magically make him into a heterosexual.

The refusal by the Bush administration, its supporters in Congress and its "spiritual advisers" to acknowledge reality is sick -- and potentially lethal to the well-being of our country. But it's clear they're not going to get better, because to do so would require they acknowledge reality enough to know they're sick in the first place.

And they're not going to do that. They actually believe there's an alternative to the "reality-based world," and that they live in it.

Yesterday, the New Life church fired Ted Haggard as its pastor because they felt it was "proven without a doubt that he has committed sexually immoral conduct."

Those darn facts again, coming home to roost.

The country can't rid itself of Bush until 2008, but on Tuesday it can begin to get rid of this sickness.

Cheney to America: Fuck You!

Dick tells America what he thinks of the vox populi:

Remember, "Bring 'em on!", Mr. President?
by Bob Cesca

President Bush's "bring 'em on" remark in July, 2003 quite literally invited the deaths of American soldiers. For this one statement alone, President Bush has forfeited his right to comment on, exploit or joke about any gaffe spoken by anyone ever. EVER. Nailing Senator Kerry on his gaffe isn't just hypocritical like, say, Larry the Cable Guy criticizing another comedian for being unfunny, or Bill O'Reilly questioning someone else's honesty. No. President Bush gaffed up a huge puddle of blood and death. President Bush, like his Mini-Macaca across the river, is all too quick to throw the kill switch on political opponents, but only succeeds in boiling statements like "bring 'em on" to the surface of an already polluted crock of shit.

"Bring 'em on" was not only insulting and shameful, it was a death sentence.

Robert Freeman:
The Bush Economy: NOT an Election Winner for Republicans

Roasting Chestnuts
by Bill Maher

New Rule: Now that we've sent "stay the course" down the memory hole, where Big Brother erases things, we've also got to retire: "The world is safer with Saddam Hussein out of power." "Don't you want America to win?" and "Wouldn't you torture someone if they knew where to find an atomic time bomb?"


One: The world isn't safer with Saddam out of power. The only people who are safer are the dead. A number which has, admittedly, increased. Saddam didn't have weapons, that he wouldn't give to Al-Qaeda, whose guts he hated. He might have changed his mind, built weapons he didn't have, and given them to people he hated, but then, so could Dairy Queen.

Two: Don't I want America to win? Are we talking about a war between Sunnis and Shiites, or the Winter Olympics? I thought we wanted democracy to win. 103 Americans died in Iraq last month. Was that winning? Would 1000 be a blow out? Also, didn't we already win? I remember reading about it on an aircraft carrier.

Three: The atomic time bomb that justifies torture. The Constitution specifically says you can't torture people, and we can assume they meant: Even if you really, really want to. Because you wouldn't make a rule against something people didn't want to do. The Eighth Amendment protects terrorists. The same way the First Amendment protects Dixie Chicks. The Framers thought protecting people from the government was more important than anything - even than protecting them from a mythical bomb. You can disagree, but that's not what our Constitution says.

Beyond the fact that it's, like, "illegal," the next problem with the pro-torture argument is that no one - in human history -- has ever been seconds away from defusing an atomic time bomb. You're not thinking of life on earth. You're thinking of "Goldfinger."

You can't make a reasoned argument against a law based on the most outlandish possible hypothetical counter-example you just pulled out of your ass. This is called the Fallacy of Accident. A twist on the old dicto simpliciter ad dictum secundum quid. Like I have to tell you.

Rumsfeld and the Big Picture
Whatever the secretary of defense might think, history will not exonerate him or his colleagues for their grave failures.

by James Carroll

''FORTUNATELY, history is not made up of daily headlines, blogs on websites, or the latest sensational attack," Donald Rumsfeld wrote in a Washington Post op-ed column last week. ''History is a bigger picture, and it takes some time and perspective to measure accurately."

Rumsfeld was arguing that any evaluation of the present catastrophe in Iraq should take a longer view, and I agree with him. Indeed, I have spent the last six years exploring two generations' worth of events and decisions that brought us here. I have written a long history of the Pentagon called ''House of War," which will be published in May. But contrary to what Rumsfeld hopes, such a ''bigger picture" in no way exonerates him or the Bush administration for its grave failures. The disaster in Iraq both recapitulates American mistakes of the past and worsens them immeasurably.

Let's begin with Rumsfeld himself. In 1975, he was Gerald Ford's secretary of defense when the USS Mayaguez was seized off Cambodia by the newly empowered Khmer Rouge, whose ascendance followed the destabilizing US ''incursion." The American crew of 38 was captured.

Rumsfeld shaped the response -- which was to ignore diplomacy, begin bombing a Cambodian port city, and dispatch a large force of Marines to rescue the crew. Bad moves based on bad intelligence. While untold Cambodian civilians were bombed, 40 American rescuers were killed in an attack on an island where the crew was thought to be held. In fact, the American sailors had already been released unharmed and set adrift on a Thai fishing vessel. The Mayaguez affair was a dress rehearsal for Rumsfeld's war in Iraq.

The Iraq war breaks with American tradition by being explicitly defined as ''preventive," but in other ways it fulfills the core tradition -- the eschewing of diplomacy in favor of war preparation, and wars, whose real purpose is to feed the insatiable appetite of the economic, political, and cultural behemoth on the Potomac. The Pentagon is 63 years old: Key moments in its lifetime cry out to be freshly understood.

Why, after the disappearance of America's Cold War enemy in the early 1990s, did Washington maintain its huge Cold War military? In what sense, for that matter, did the United States ''win" the Cold War, when its structures were overwhelmingly dismantled by the other side?

By what right did the United States come out of the energy crisis of the 1970s proclaiming, with the Carter Doctrine, its intention to use military force to protect access to Persian Gulf oil? Jimmy Carter, too, is a progenitor of the war in Iraq.

In reviewing an arms race that led, across 40 years, to the accumulation of more than 100,000 nuclear weapons, when will the United States reckon with the truth that Washington held the initiative at almost every stage of that escalation, with Moscow forever struggling to catch up? What does it say about America that the United States led the way up this mountain of horror, with Moscow, under Mikhail Gorbachev, leading the way down?

What is revealed by the ''retirement syndrome," in Robert Jay Lifton's phrase -- the consistent phenomenon of men whose careers shaped the national security state, only to denounce its assumptions as they left power? This is true not only of legions of generals and admirals, but of statesmen like Henry L. Stimson and George Kennan, civilian hawks like Robert S. McNamara and Paul Nitze, and presidents like Dwight D. Eisenhower, who famously decried the ''military-industrial complex" he had just created.

What does it say that, as pressures periodically built to rein in Pentagon budgets and influence, new threats and enemies were conveniently discovered, ''rescuing" the Pentagon, as Dean Acheson said of the North Korean invasion of South Korea? Ho Chi Minh, Manuel Noriega, and Saddam Hussein were such rescuers, and so was Osama bin Laden. Now comes Iran.

How did the impulse to demonize the enemy in Moscow paralyze American strategic and political thinking? This psychological imprisonment was so complete that the demonizing mindset carried over into the new century, when dreaded ''communism" was replaced by ''terrorism." George W. Bush did not invent this myopia.

Iraq shows how self-destructive were the responses of Americans and their government to the crisis of Sept. 11, 2001. They were not new, but flowed along a channel through which powerful currents had been running for 60 years.

The point of history's bigger picture, however, is to see that, as human choices shaped this terrible outcome, human choices can change it.

James Carroll, a regular columnist for the Boston Globe, is the author of the National Book Award-winning American Requiem, Constantine's Sword, a history of Christian anti-Semitism, and the forthcoming House of War, about the growing power of the Pentagon

Fw: Iranian missile launches escalate tensions

----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Martin, Peace Action" <Peaceact@mail.democracyinaction.org>
To: <miriamvieni@optonline.net>
Sent: Sunday, November 05, 2006 12:24 PM
Subject: Iranian missile launches escalate tensions

Dear Peace Supporter,

I thank you for being among the first 25,000 to sign our "No War with Iran!"
petition - and regret to confirm the latest news from that country.

News sources reported yesterday that Iran tested dozens of missiles,
including the long range Sahab-3, at the beginning of ten days of military
exercises intended as a response to recent American-led exercises in the
Persian Gulf. This is yet one more escalation in an already precarious
situation between the United States and Iran.

As part of our growing work to prevent a war with Iran, Peace Action has now
joined forces with After Downing Street and Progressive Democrats of
America. With the help of Cindy Sheehan they will be delivering their own
petition, "Don't Attack Iran," to the White House next Wednesday, November
8, and we urge you to add your name before they deliver it.

Please click here to add your signature to the "Don't Attack Iran" petition:

http://www.dontattackiran.com

While we would not usually ask you to sign two similar petitions like this,
the critical difference is that theirs is addressed to the White House,
while the Peace Action petition you signed is addressed to Congress. Both
branches of government need to start feeling the pressure on this issue now,
and that is why I urge you to also sign the "Don't Attack Iran" petition.

http://www.dontattackiran.com

General Yahya Rahim Safavi, head of the Revolutionary Guards in Iran,
described the missile launches as a reaction to American military threats,
contending "We want to show our deterrent and defensive power to
trans-regional enemies, and we hope that they will understand the message of
the maneuvers."

And when he says "trans-regional enemies," he means us.

It is impossible to overemphasize the horrific consequences that would flow
from a war with Iran, which could well escalate into the "clash of
civilizations" that some of the neo-cons in the Bush Administration actually
desire. U.S. and Iran-led military maneuvers will only further devastate
any chance we have for a peaceful settlement to this growing conflict, and
we must compel our government to stop the saber-rattling and come to the
negotiating table.

Thanks again for signing Peace Action's "No War with Iran!" petition to the
House and Senate leadership. Now let's keep the message going to President
Bush!

http://www.dontattackiran.com

We will continue to update you on new developments, as well as next steps
with our own campaign after the election. With your help, we can and will
prevent a war with Iran.

Sincerely,

Kevin Martin
Executive Director
Peace Action

P.S. In only a month we have gathered more than 25,000 signatures on our
"No War in Iran!" petition due to the overwhelming dedication to peace or
supporters like you. We will be taking the next steps to pressure Congress
soon, including a significant online promotion effort of the campaign, but
we need you to add your signature and support now to the "Don't Attack Iran"
petition, which will be delivered to George W. Bush next Wednesday, November
8. Thanks for signing it today!

http://www.dontattackiran.com
/*Your email ID. <diaEmailID='221768477' thread=4942/>--*/

The Apologist
by Ralph Nader

The baying pack of belligerent draft dodgers - Messrs. Bush, Cheney and Limbaugh - were out in verbal force this week against John Kerry. The Senator miscued a joke about Bush by reading without the "us" in the line, "You end up getting us stuck in a war in Iraq. Just ask President Bush." The missing of the "us" word gave the messianic militarists an opening to demand that Kerry apologize to the U.S. troops for his "insulting" and "shameful" remarks.

Interesting isn't it, how a mis-reading of a word can be seen as cause for apology when thousands of illegal and destructive deeds and tortures constitute the Bush regime's "business as usual."

There will likely be no apologies from Bush/Cheney for putting U.S. soldiers into a fabricated war-quagmire - a disastrous, costly boomeranging invasion. But to set the record straight about who should apologize, here are on the ground reasons for nine Bush/Cheney mea culpas.

1. FAILURE TO PROVIDE ADEQUATE BODY ARMOR AND TRUCK ARMOR IN A TIMELY FASHION.
A Pentagon study found that "as many as 80 percent of the marines who have been killed in Iraq from wounds to the upper body could have survived if they had had extra body armor," according to a New York Times report. Hundreds of soldiers died who could have been saved.

The Washington Post reported "that in some places in Iraq the U.S. military could provide only one Interceptor vest with protective plates for every three U.S. soldiers."

2. FAILURE TO ACCURATELY REPORT CASUALTIES.
The Bush administration has undercounted injuries to soldiers in Iraq to hold down opposition to the war. Injuries that were not incurred in the middle of battle are not part of the official casualty count by the Bush Administration. Cases of diseases, such as thousands of Sand Fly afflictions, are not even counted. This disrespects these soldiers and their families to bolster a cynical political calculation.

3. FAILURE TO PROVIDE SUFFICIENT TROOP STRENGTH IN IRAQ
The Washington Times reports that retired military leaders who served in Iraq said that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld "ignored advice for more troops, failed to make a post- invasion plan or equip troops properly and hid information from the public." "I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the administration did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq," retired Army Maj. Gen. John R.S. Batiste told the panel. Mr. Batiste, a self-described Republican who has been criticizing Mr. Rumsfeld for months, said the secretary "forbade military planners from developing plans for securing a postwar Iraq" and helped create the current insurgency by ignoring the potential for one, though it was "an absolute certainty."

Retired Army Maj. General Paul D. Eaton, who criticized Mr. Rumsfeld in the New York Times last spring, said the post-invasion effort in Iraq is about 60,000 troops short of what it needs for success and that the Army "is in terrible shape," lacking proper equipment and resources.

President Bush should never have invaded Iraq, but whenever troops are deployed they should be at levels which are necessary to protect the civilian population -- an obligation military occupiers are required, under international law, to fulfill. Hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi women, men and children have become the casualties of incompetent planning.

4. FAILURE TO PROVIDE TROOPS IN IRAQ WITH SAFE DRINKING WATER.
Former Halliburton employees and army officials have testified before Congress that Halliburton provided our troops in Iraq with very contaminated water, which the troops used to shower, wash their hands and their faces, brush their teeth, wash their clothes, and sometimes even make coffee.

5. SENDING PART-TIME SOLDIERS FROM THE RESERVES AND NATIONAL GUARD ON DANGEROUS MISSIONS - SUCH AS ROADSIDE MINE SEARCHES - WITHOUT ANYTHING RESEMBLING ADEQUATE TRAINING.

6. FAILING TO CARE FOR RETURNING TROOPS.
The Knight Ridder News Service reported that the Government Accountability Office found that the Veterans Administration "badly underestimated how many soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan might seek medical and other services, in part because of problems in getting accurate information from the Pentagon." Consequently many returning troops have had difficulty getting prompt medical attention.

7. FAILURE TO HELP VETERANS WITH POST-TRAUMATIC STRESS DISORDER (PTSD).
The Washington Post reports that a Government Accountability Office report concluded: "Nearly four in five service members returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who were found to be at risk for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were never referred by government clinicians for further help..."

8. FAILURE TO PROTECT SOLDIERS AND VETERANS FROM OFF-BASE SCAMS.
The New York Times reports that "several financial services companies or their agents are using questionable tactics on military bases to sell insurance and investments that may not fit the needs of people in uniform." USA TODAY reports that a Defense Department report said "the average borrower pays $827 on a $339 loan and called the lending predatory." A recently passed law will cap interest rates at 36 percent. The Defense Department should have cracked down on the corporate and economic predators that prey on military personnel and their families.

9. FAILURE TO ADEQUATELY PAY TROOPS WHEN ABROAD AND WHEN INJURED.
The Baltimore Sun reports that deployment in Iraq is "taking a financial toll on part-time soldiers who make up about half of the 150,000 troops there. Forty-one percent of National Guard and Reserve soldiers are losing thousands of dollars through a "pay gap" between their civilian salary and military pay..."

These inexcusable, contemptuous indifferences to the well-being of the soldiers, combined with the rush to wage an unnecessary, immoral and unconstitutional war, characterized by corrupt, wasteful contracting debacles of unprecedented proportions, should compel President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney not only to apologize, but to resign.

"Bushit" Bumpersticker Owner Files Lawsuit
By Matthew Rothschild
“He pulled me over for his own political agenda, and grossly abused his authority in violating my free speech.”y in violating my free speech.”

New York Times Editorial
The Difference Two Years Made

On Tuesday, when this page runs the list of people it has endorsed for election, we will include no Republican Congressional candidates for the first time in our memory. Although Times editorials tend to agree with Democrats on national policy, we have proudly and consistently endorsed a long line of moderate Republicans, particularly for the House. Our only political loyalty is to making the two-party system as vital and responsible as possible.

That is why things are different this year.

To begin with, the Republican majority that has run the House — and for the most part, the Senate — during President Bush’s tenure has done a terrible job on the basics. Its tax-cutting-above-all-else has wrecked the budget, hobbled the middle class and endangered the long-term economy. It has refused to face up to global warming and done pathetically little about the country’s dependence on foreign oil.

Republican leaders, particularly in the House, have developed toxic symptoms of an overconfident majority that has been too long in power. They methodically shut the opposition — and even the more moderate members of their own party — out of any role in the legislative process. Their only mission seems to be self-perpetuation.

The current Republican majority managed to achieve that burned-out, brain-dead status in record time, and with a shocking disregard for the most minimal ethical standards. It was bad enough that a party that used to believe in fiscal austerity blew billions on pork-barrel projects. It is worse that many of the most expensive boondoggles were not even directed at their constituents, but at lobbyists who financed their campaigns and high-end lifestyles.

That was already the situation in 2004, and even then this page endorsed Republicans who had shown a high commitment to ethics reform and a willingness to buck their party on important issues like the environment, civil liberties and women’s rights.

For us, the breaking point came over the Republicans’ attempt to undermine the fundamental checks and balances that have safeguarded American democracy since its inception. The fact that the White House, House and Senate are all controlled by one party is not a threat to the balance of powers, as long as everyone understands the roles assigned to each by the Constitution. But over the past two years, the White House has made it clear that it claims sweeping powers that go well beyond any acceptable limits. Rather than doing their duty to curb these excesses, the Congressional Republicans have dedicated themselves to removing restraints on the president’s ability to do whatever he wants. To paraphrase Tom DeLay, the Republicans feel you don’t need to have oversight hearings if your party is in control of everything.

An administration convinced of its own perpetual rightness and a partisan Congress determined to deflect all criticism of the chief executive has been the recipe for what we live with today.

Congress, in particular the House, has failed to ask probing questions about the war in Iraq or hold the president accountable for his catastrophic bungling of the occupation. It also has allowed Mr. Bush to avoid answering any questions about whether his administration cooked the intelligence on weapons of mass destruction. Then, it quietly agreed to close down the one agency that has been riding herd on crooked and inept American contractors who have botched everything from construction work to the security of weapons.

After the revelations about the abuse, torture and illegal detentions in Abu Ghraib, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Congress shielded the Pentagon from any responsibility for the atrocities its policies allowed to happen. On the eve of the election, and without even a pretense at debate in the House, Congress granted the White House permission to hold hundreds of noncitizens in jail forever, without due process, even though many of them were clearly sent there in error.

In the Senate, the path for this bill was cleared by a handful of Republicans who used their personal prestige and reputation for moderation to paper over the fact that the bill violates the Constitution in fundamental ways. Having acquiesced in the president’s campaign to dilute their own authority, lawmakers used this bill to further Mr. Bush’s goal of stripping the powers of the only remaining independent branch, the judiciary.

This election is indeed about George W. Bush — and the Congressional majority’s insistence on protecting him from the consequences of his mistakes and misdeeds. Mr. Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 and proceeded to govern as if he had an enormous mandate. After he actually beat his opponent in 2004, he announced he now had real political capital and intended to spend it. We have seen the results. It is frightening to contemplate the new excesses he could concoct if he woke up next Wednesday and found that his party had maintained its hold on the House and Senate.

Anger Joins Grief as Marine’s Family Feels Misled
By SHAILA DEWAN
The parents of a marine were left feeling alone and incredulous at what they say was the incompetence of the initial investigation into their son’s death.

Karl Rove is no doubt kicking himself for not turning on Pastor Ted to the stud services of Jeff Gannon for his secret gay trysts. Gannon's right-wing ideological purity is unquestioned, and he is the Republicans' first choice for a good male escort "top" to satiate their healthy appetites for rough, sweaty man-on-man sex.

Gannon, who was welcomed at the White House throughout Bush's first term and even posed as a journalist in the press corps, would never "out" one of his fellow Republicans less than a week before a pivotal midterm election. Gannon is the kind of gay male escort Republicans love: he could be counted on to satisfy Pastor Ted's monthly needs, and then go out and remind good Christians to cast their votes against gay marriage.

-Joseph A. Palermo

Rats Abandon Ship

Key architect and supporter of Iraq disaster see the light.

Much of American Public Naïve, or Worse, About Bush and Civil Liberties

By Matthew Rothschild
Not enough Americans revere the liberties that make this country great and are all too willing to surrender them. And some Americans seem to want to live on Planet Dictator.

Engaging Iran
Scott Ritter writes that if US officials ceased their saber-rattling over Iran's nuclear ambitions, they would be surprised.

A November surprise from within? Military newspapers say: Fire Rumsfeld

If the Bush administration had a November surprise in mind, this certainly wasn't it: On Monday morning, one day before Election Day, an editorial in the Army Times, the Navy Times, the Marine Corps Times and the Air Force Times will call for the removal of Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense.

"Rumsfeld has lost credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with Congress and with the public at large," the papers will say. "His strategy has failed, and his ability to lead is compromised. And although the blame for our failures in Iraq rests with the secretary, it will be the troops who bear its brunt."
The papers say that George W. Bust must face "the bruising truth": Rumsfeld "must go."

The four papers are published by the Military Times Media Group, which is part of Gannett Co. and therefore not directly affiliated with the military. But as David Segal, the director of the Center for Research on Military Organization at the University of Maryland, tells the San Francisco Chronicle, the papers are "widely read" by and "influential with" the "professional military." Segal suggests that given their close relationship with the military, the papers wouldn't be likely to do something as dramatic as calling for Rumsfeld's ouster if their editors weren't hearing similar calls from senior officers in the military.

Indeed, the papers' editorial makes it pretty clear that their editors have been hearing such things. "It is one thing for the majority of Americans to think Rumsfeld has failed," the editors write. "But when the nation's current military leaders start to break publicly with their defense secretary, then it is clear that he is losing control of the institution he ostensibly leads. These officers have been loyal public promoters of a war policy many privately feared would fail. They have kept their counsel private, adhering to more than two centuries of American tradition of subordination of the military to civilian authority. And although that tradition, and the officers' deep sense of honor, prevent them from saying this publicly, more and more of them believe it."

The military papers aren't the only ones hearing from officers who are unhappy with Rumsfeld and the way in which the Bush administration has prosecuted the war in Iraq. The larger question is whether Bush will begin to listen to these complaints. We know the answer to that one so far, but Tuesday's election could turn up the volume considerably if voters fill Congress with Democrats and -- in the process -- send the Republicans who remain a clear message that things had better change before 2008.

-- Tim Grieve

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

US seeks silence from CIA prisoners

A Wartime Love Story - New York Times
The New York Times

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 4, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
A Wartime Love Story
By
MAUREEN DOWD

Washington

At the heart of every administration, there is one relationship above all
others that shapes history. Ron and Nancy. Poppy Bush and James Baker.
Billary.
Cheney & Rummy.

W. is the hood ornament, but Cheney & Rummy are the chitty chitty bang bang
engine of this administration. Their four-decade friendship stretches from
Nixon
to Bush II, from Vietnam to Vietnam II.

It's a beautiful love story, really, even more touching than Ted Haggard,
the evangelical preacher and Bush White House adviser, asking a male
prostitute
for crystal meth, or Borat putting a bag over the head of a squealing Pamela
Anderson and carrying her off.

The country, the world, a growing number in their party, and some of the
president's own family may object to the star-crossed match of Cheney &
Rummy,
but the two men are secure in each other's embrace. They've had tons of fun,
from unmanning Colin Powell to unraveling the Geneva Conventions to undoing
half a century of American foreign policy to unnerving the small Chesapeake
Bay town of St. Michaels, Md., where they have bought weekend estates near
each other.

Like some out-of-control manbot, Vice says they will continue "full speed
ahead" in Iraq, no matter what voters say. "We're not running for office,"
he
told ABC's George Stephanopoulos. "We're doing what we think is right." Damn
the democracy - full speed ahead.

W. ratified the Cheney-Rummy mésalliance this week, saying they were doing
"fantastic" jobs and vowing to stick with them. He said "the good thing
about
Vice President Cheney's advice is, you don't read about it in the newspaper
after he gives it." (How would he know?) Being discreet when you give
disastrous
advice: priceless.

Noting that Rummy had presided over Afghanistan and Iraq while overhauling
the military, W. said he was "pleased with the progress we're making."
(Insert
your own punch line here.)

Rummy did have one other defender. The House majority leader, John Boehner,
told Wolf Blitzer that it is the generals who should be blamed if the war is
going badly. So now Republicans are trashing Democrats for undermining the
troops even as they're undermining the troops?

Mr. Bush will go down in history as an isolated, naïve president who was led
by Cheney & Rummy, when he could have gotten better advice from his dad and
wife.

In his new book, "State of Denial," Bob Woodward sketches a scene in which
an anxious first lady presses Andy Card for information about the war. Mr.
Card
says he can't tell her classified information, and she says that W. won't
tell her that stuff, either. She confides her fear that Rummy is hurting her
husband and wonders why he puts up with it.

It's enough to make you long for Nancy Reagan, who quickly dispatched
advisers who were hurting her husband.

Even Rummy's Iraq war cheerleaders, "Cakewalk" Ken Adelman and Richard "Nix
Blix" Perle, are falling all over themselves to knife the Pentagon boss.
Scaling
new heights in the annals of Now They Tell Us, the two men blame the
"dysfunctional" Bush team for the "disaster" in Iraq and say that if they
had known
then what we all know now (and what some of us knew then), they never would
have pushed to invade Iraq.

In January's Vanity Fair, Mr. Adelman told David Rose that when he wrote in
2002 that "liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk," he "just presumed that what
I considered to be the most competent national-security team since Truman
was indeed going to be competent. They turned out to be among the most
incompetent
teams in the postwar era. Not only did each of them, individually, have
enormous flaws, but together they were deadly, dysfunctional."

He said of his old friend Rummy: "I'm crushed by his performance. Did he
change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really
challenged
before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me." He concludes that "the idea
of using our power for moral good in the world" is finished, at least for a
generation.

The neocons insist that it was the execution of the war that was wrong.
Actually, it was wrong to go to war with a trumped-up casus belli and
without ever
debating what could happen if they took a baseball bat to a beehive. A war
designed to bring moral good shouldn't start with a pack of lies. As a
Shakespeare
expert, Mr. Adelman should have known about ends and means.

Copyright 2006
The New York Times Company

Posted by Miriam V.

The Sunday Times
November 05, 2006

Doctors: let us kill disabled babies
Sarah-Kate Templeton, Health Correspondent

::nobreak::ONE of Britain's royal medical colleges is calling on the health
profession to consider permitting the euthanasia of seriously disabled
newborn
babies.

The proposal by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecology is a
reaction to the number of such children surviving because of medical
advances.
The
college is arguing that "active euthanasia" should be considered for the
overall good of families, to spare parents the emotional burden and
financial
hardship of bringing up the sickest babies.

"A very disabled child can mean a disabled family," it says. "If
life-shortening and deliberate interventions to kill infants were available,
they might
have an impact on obstetric decision-making, even preventing some late
abortions, as some parents would be more confident about continuing a
pregnancy
and taking a risk on outcome."

Geneticists and medical ethicists supported the proposal - as did the mother
of a severely disabled child - but a prominent children's doctor described
it as "social engineering".

The college called for "active euthanasia" of newborns to be considered as
part of an inquiry into the ethical issues raised by the policy of
prolonging
life in newborn babies. The inquiry is being carried out by the Nuffield
Council on Bioethics.

The college's submission to the inquiry states: "We would like the working
party to think more radically about non-resuscitation, withdrawal of
treatment
decisions, the best interests test and active euthanasia as they are ways of
widening the management options available to the sickest of newborns."

Initially, the inquiry did not address euthanasia of newborns as this is
illegal in Britain. The college has succeeded in having it considered.
Although
it says it is not formally calling for active euthanasia to be introduced,
it wants the mercy killing of newborn babies to be debated by society.

The report does not spell out which conditions might justify euthanasia, but
in the Netherlands mercy killing is permitted for a range of incurable
conditions,
including severe spina bifida and the painful skin condition called
epidermolysis bullosa.

Dr Pieter Sauer, co-author of the Groningen Protocol, the Dutch national
guidelines on euthanasia of newborns, claims British paediatricians perform
mercy
killings, and says the practice should be open.

Sauer, head of the department of paediatrics at the University Medical
Centre Groningen, said: "In England they have exactly the same type of
patients
as
we have here. English neonatologists gave me the indication that this is
happening."

Although euthanasia for severely handicapped newborn babies would prove
contentious, some British doctors and ethicists are now in favour. Joy
Delhanty,
professor of human genetics at University College London, said: "I would
support these views. I think it is morally wrong to strive to keep alive
babies
that are then going to suffer many months or years of very ill health."

Dr Richard Nicholson, editor of the Bulletin of Medical Ethics, who has
admitted hastening the death of two severely handicapped newborn babies when
he
was a junior doctor in the 1970s, said: "I wouldn't argue against this." He
spoke of the "pain, distress and discomfort" of severely handicapped babies.

The college's submission was also welcomed by John Harris, a member of the
government's Human Genetics Commission and professor of bioethics at
Manchester
University. "We can terminate for serious foetal abnormality up to term but
cannot kill a newborn. What do people think has happened in the passage down
the birth canal to make it okay to kill the foetus at one end of the birth
canal but not at the other?" he said.

Edna Kennedy of Newcastle upon Tyne, whose son suffered epidermolysis
bullosa, said: "In extremely controlled circumstances, where the baby is
really suffering,
it should be an option for the mother."

However, John Wyatt, consultant neonatologist at University College London
hospital, said: "Intentional killing is not part of medical care." He added:
"The majority of doctors and health professionals believe that once you
introduce the possibility of intentional killing into medical practice you
change
the fundamental nature of medicine. It immediately becomes a subjective
decision as to whose life is worthwhile."

If a doctor can decide whether a life is worth living, "it changes medicine
into a form of social engineering where the aim is to maximise the benefit
for
society and minimise those who are perceived as worthless".

Simone Aspis of the British Council of Disabled People said: "If we
introduced euthanasia for certain conditions it would tell adults with those
conditions
that they were worth less than other members of society."

Posted by Miriam V.

Idaho Prof Criticized Over Bigfoot Study

Evangelist: I Bought Meth From Gay Escort

Rosie, David, and Wolf: Why Don't They Want Us to Win?

by Arianna Huffington

The GOP's descent into demonization continues.

After failing to gain traction with its "a vote for Democrats is a vote for Osama" ad campaign, the Republicans' message machine has adopted an even more irrational strategy: Go after the talk show hosts!

That's right. Painting Jim Webb as a pornographer, Harold Ford as a playah, and Michael J. Fox as a Parkinson's poseur fizzled.

So now it's Wolf Blitzer, David Letterman, and Rosie O'Donnell and the rest of The View crew in the crosshairs, being sleazed as part of the Hate America First Coalition.

"Do you want the United States to win in Iraq?" thundered Bill O'Reilly to David Letterman. "Do you right now? Do you want the United States to win?"

He had the same question for Rosie, Joy Behar, and Barbara Walters: "Do you want America to win in Iraq?" When a yes or no answer wasn't immediately forthcoming, O'Reilly leapt to the conclusion: "So you don't want America to win in Iraq..."

And it isn't just O'Reilly. GOP Rep. Duncan Hunter also played the guilt-by-insinuation card, asking Wolf Blitzer: "Does CNN want America to win this thing? You can't be on both sides of the war."

If he'd had time for a follow up, Hunter no doubt would have asked, "And have you stopped beating your wife?"

Clearly indicating that the Vice President's residence had also gotten the kill-the-messenger-memo, Lynne Cheney took time out from denying her past endeavors as a salacious scribe to pose the same loaded query to Blitzer: "Do you want us to win?"

For the record, Blitzer replied: "The answer, of course, is we want the United States to win. We are Americans. There's no doubt about that." But it didn't really matter; the sleazy implication had already been slung, the subconscious connection made: these TV folk must not want us to win! Just like the Democrats.

That's clearly the lizard brain synapse Karl Rove is hoping to activate. Stumping in Georgia yesterday, President Bush connected the dots: "The Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: the terrorists win and America loses."

There you have it: pull the lever for anyone with a (D) next to their name and it's as good as handing the Stanley Cup, the Super Bowl trophy, the Masters green jacket, and the keys to Baghdad to al Qaeda.

Can you think of anything more absurd than that? Other than accusing Michael J. Fox of faking his symptoms or trying to score political points by implying that Joy Behar is an al Qaeda appeaser.

Indeed, it was actually Behar who provided the most cogent response to the "Do you want America to win?" nonsense -- one that all Democratic candidates should pick up -- when she turned the tables on O'Reilly and asked: "What does it mean to win?"

That should be the defining question of the next 7 days.

Let's just stipulate that everyone in America not in a straight jacket or part of a terrorist sleeper cell wants America to "win" -- and center the debate on what, exactly, the president and the GOP mean by victory.
And please, Mr. President, don't give us the usual bromides about stable democracy or Iraq security for forces standing up so we can stand down. It's become all-to-clear that those are benchmarks that won't be met in the foreseeable future.

On Monday Bush said, "The Democrat goal is to get out of Iraq. The Republican goal is to win in Iraq."
Hmm, I know what Democrats reaching their supposed goal would look like -- but can't say the same for the Republican goal.

What does it mean to win? Republicans clearly don't have an answer. That's why they are throwing the trash-the-media Hail Mary. And why the rest of us should keep demanding an answer to the question of what winning is.

As Bechtel Goes - New York Times
The New York Times

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
November 3, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
As Bechtel Goes
By
PAUL KRUGMAN

Bechtel, the giant engineering company, is leaving Iraq. Its mission - to
rebuild power, water and sewage plants - wasn't accomplished: Baghdad
received
less than six hours a day of electricity last month, and much of Iraq's
population lives with untreated sewage and without clean water. But Bechtel,
having
received $2.3 billion of taxpayers' money and having lost the lives of 52
employees, has come to the end of its last government contract.

As Bechtel goes, so goes the whole reconstruction effort. Whatever our
leaders may say about their determination to stay the course complete the
mission,
when it comes to rebuilding Iraq they've already cut and run. The $21
billion allocated for reconstruction over the last three years has been
spent, much
of it on security rather than its intended purpose, and there's no more
money in the pipeline.

The failure of reconstruction in Iraq raises three questions. First, how
much did that failure contribute to the overall failure of the war? Second,
how
was it that America, the great can-do nation, in this case couldn't and didn't?
Finally, if we've given up on rebuilding Iraq, what are our troops dying
for?

There's no definitive way to answer the first question. You can make a good
case that the invasion of Iraq was doomed no matter what, because we never
had
enough military manpower to provide security. But the lack of electricity
and clean water did a lot to dissipate any initial good will the Iraqis may
have
felt toward the occupation. And Iraqis are well aware that the billions
squandered by American contractors included a lot of Iraqi oil revenue as
well
as U.S. taxpayers' dollars.

Consider the symbolism of Iraq's new police academy, which Stuart Bowen, the
special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction, has called "the most
essential
civil security project in the country." It was built at a cost of $75
million by Parsons Corporation, which received a total of about $1 billion
for Iraq
reconstruction projects. But the academy was so badly built that feces and
urine leak from the ceilings in the student barracks.

Think about it. We want the Iraqis to stand up so we can stand down. But if
they do stand up, we'll dump excrement on their heads.

As for how this could have happened, that's easy: major contractors
believed, correctly, that their political connections insulated them from
accountability.
Halliburton and other companies with huge Iraq contracts were basically in
the same position as Donald Rumsfeld: they were so closely identified with
President
Bush and, especially, Vice President Cheney that firing or even disciplining
them would have been seen as an admission of personal failure on the part
of top elected officials.

As a result, the administration and its allies in Congress fought
accountability all the way. Administration officials have made repeated
backdoor efforts
to close the office of Mr. Bowen, whose job is to oversee the use of
reconstruction money. Just this past May, with the failed reconstruction
already winding
down, the White House arranged for the last $1.5 billion of reconstruction
money to be placed outside Mr. Bowen's jurisdiction. And now, finally,
Congress
has passed a bill whose provisions include the complete elimination of his
agency next October.

The bottom line is that those charged with rebuilding Iraq had no incentive
to do the job right, so they didn't.

You can see, by the way, why a Democratic takeover of the House, if it
happens next week, would be such a pivotal event: suddenly, committee
chairmen with
subpoena power would be in a position to investigate where all the Iraq
money went.

But that's all in the past. What about the future?

Back in June, after a photo-op trip to Iraq, Mr. Bush said something I agree
with. "You can measure progress in megawatts of electricity delivered," he
declared. "You can measure progress in terms of oil sold on the market on
behalf of the Iraqi people." But what those measures actually show is the
absence
of progress. By any material measure, Iraqis are worse off than they were
under Saddam.

And we're not planning to do anything about it: the U.S.-led reconstruction
effort in Iraq is basically over. I don't know whether the administration is
afraid to ask U.S. voters for more money, or simply considers the situation
hopeless. Either way, the United States has accepted defeat on
reconstruction.

Yet Americans are still fighting and dying in Iraq. For what?

Copyright 2006

Posted by Miriam V.

Don't forget to massage me down there, too

Searching for the rapture, maybe?

Conservatives: Who cares if we teach terrorists how to build nukes?

Some conservatives still believe there is evidence out there that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and actively collaborated with Al-Qaeda before the U.S. invasion -- the trouble is, we just didn't look hard enough. So earlier this year they persuaded Congress to take a vast trove of documents relating to Iraq and post them online. Given enough eyeballs, the argument went, we could find those WMD.

The hunt for the smoking gun never turned up much, though much was made in some right-wing quarters about documents included in the file that happened to be about al-Qaeda but had no connection to Iraq.

Today, the New York Times reported that the online Iraq document dump did contain something of interest: "detailed accounts of Iraq's secret nuclear research before the 1991 Persian Gulf war." (My italics.) Experts say these documents could prove extremely helpful to anyone out there trying to figure out how to make a homemade bomb.

Oops. The entire file -- relevant documents having no doubt already been copied to hard drives of bomb-making students everywhere -- has now been pulled from the Net.

So the right's efforts to score political points have resulted in dangerously detailed nuke-building information being broadcast to the entire Internet. Instead of feeling chagrined, the conservative blogosphere is instead dancing a bizarre victory jig this morning: The presence of bomb recipes, the cry goes, proves that Saddam had dangerous nuclear information after all!

But no one ever argued that Saddam didn't have dangerous information about how to build nuclear weapons. The whole point of the U.S.-backed and U.N.-operated anti-proliferation regime was to prevent him from using that information to build bombs. We now know that program successfully hobbled Saddam's WMD ambitions -- until the Bush administration decided to dismantle it in favor of a regime-changing invasion.

The documents in question date back before the 1991 Gulf War, at a time when liberals and conservatives alike agree that Saddam had nuclear ambitions. Recognizing that they are dangerous and should not be public proves nothing about the threat Saddam did or didn't pose to the U.S. in the post-9/11 era. Nor, despite what Glenn Reynolds says, does taking these documents seriously prove anything about the importance or authenticity of any of the other documents in the file.

The straw man being held aloft by the National Review's Jim Geraghty and others is that anti-war liberals never took the threat Saddam posed seriously, yet now we know he had a nuclear cookbook. But the real story here is that conservatives now believe that attempting to prove they were right about Saddam should take priority over keeping nuclear know-how out of terrorist hands.

House Intelligence chairman Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.), who led the release-the-documents move, blames the Director of National Intelligence for failing to censor the sensitive nuclear information. But Hoekstra says he's "pleased that the document release program continues to stimulate public discussion of these issues." I'm sure that bomb-makers with Internet connections are equally pleased.

-- Scott Rosenberg

Dumb and Dumber?

November 3, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Insulting Our Troops, and Our Intelligence
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

George Bush, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld think you’re stupid. Yes, they do.

They think they can take a mangled quip about President Bush and Iraq by John Kerry — a man who is not even running for office but who, unlike Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney, never ran away from combat service — and get you to vote against all Democrats in this election.

Every time you hear Mr. Bush or Mr. Cheney lash out against Mr. Kerry, I hope you will say to yourself, “They must think I’m stupid.” Because they surely do.

They think that they can get you to overlook all of the Bush team’s real and deadly insults to the U.S. military over the past six years by hyping and exaggerating Mr. Kerry’s mangled gibe at the president.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to the U.S. military than to send it into combat in Iraq without enough men — to launch an invasion of a foreign country not by the Powell Doctrine of overwhelming force, but by the Rumsfeld Doctrine of just enough troops to lose? What could be a bigger insult than that?

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than sending them off to war without the proper equipment, so that some soldiers in the field were left to buy their own body armor and to retrofit their own jeeps with scrap metal so that roadside bombs in Iraq would only maim them for life and not kill them? And what could be more injurious and insulting than Don Rumsfeld’s response to criticism that he sent our troops off in haste and unprepared: Hey, you go to war with the army you’ve got — get over it.

What could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in uniform than to send them off to war in Iraq without any coherent postwar plan for political reconstruction there, so that the U.S. military has had to assume not only security responsibilities for all of Iraq but the political rebuilding as well? The Bush team has created a veritable library of military histories — from “Cobra II” to “Fiasco” to “State of Denial” — all of which contain the same damning conclusion offered by the very soldiers and officers who fought this war: This administration never had a plan for the morning after, and we’ve been making it up — and paying the price — ever since.

And what could possibly be more injurious and insulting to our men and women in Iraq than to send them off to war and then go out and finance the very people they’re fighting against with our gluttonous consumption of oil? Sure, George Bush told us we’re addicted to oil, but he has not done one single significant thing — demanded higher mileage standards from Detroit, imposed a gasoline tax or even used the bully pulpit of the White House to drive conservation — to end that addiction. So we continue to finance the U.S. military with our tax dollars, while we finance Iran, Syria, Wahhabi mosques and Al Qaeda madrassas with our energy purchases.

Everyone says that Karl Rove is a genius. Yeah, right. So are cigarette companies. They get you to buy cigarettes even though we know they cause cancer. That is the kind of genius Karl Rove is. He is not a man who has designed a strategy to reunite our country around an agenda of renewal for the 21st century — to bring out the best in us. His “genius” is taking some irrelevant aside by John Kerry and twisting it to bring out the worst in us, so you will ignore the mess that the Bush team has visited on this country.

And Karl Rove has succeeded at that in the past because he was sure that he could sell just enough Bush cigarettes, even though people knew they caused cancer. Please, please, for our country’s health, prove him wrong this time.

Let Karl know that you’re not stupid. Let him know that you know that the most patriotic thing to do in this election is to vote against an administration that has — through sheer incompetence — brought us to a point in Iraq that was not inevitable but is now unwinnable.

Let Karl know that you think this is a critical election, because you know as a citizen that if the Bush team can behave with the level of deadly incompetence it has exhibited in Iraq — and then get away with it by holding on to the House and the Senate — it means our country has become a banana republic. It means our democracy is in tatters because it is so gerrymandered, so polluted by money, and so divided by professional political hacks that we can no longer hold the ruling party to account.

It means we’re as stupid as Karl thinks we are.

I, for one, don’t think we’re that stupid. Next Tuesday we’ll see.

The real insult to our troops: Bush

Kerry's handling of his botched joke was pathetic -- but it can't match the president's lethal stupidity in his handling of the Iraq war.
By Joe Conason

John Kerry is scarcely a competent politician, let alone a comedian, so his attempt to avenge the humiliations of 2004 instead of immediately acknowledging his gaffe can come as no surprise. He ought to have resisted the urge to confront the cheap politicians and cheaper commentators who so eagerly distorted the meaning of that fumbled wisecrack. He should have apologized first, depriving his critics of their insincere outrage, and counterattacked later.

It is indeed advisable in politics to strike fast and hard at aggressive adversaries. But in this instance, it was Kerry's stumbling aggression that became the issue. He needed to make amends for saying something that sounded offensive to soldiers and veterans, even though he meant no such thing. His reluctance to respond with fluency and grace suggests that wounded pride overruled better judgment.

Still, this overblown episode seems unlikely to change the opinion of even the most foolish and poorly informed citizens. At most, the White House and the congressional leadership have succeeded in arousing the ever-simmering resentments of their base -- and, of course, giving compliant journalists an excuse to bash Democrats again.

But if Republicans and their friends in the media are so eager to talk about what Kerry said and what he meant, there is certainly plenty of context, subtext and pretext to sustain debate.

Perhaps the hidden meaning of Kerry's remarks can be derived from the identity of the speaker. Those who hate him insist that the Massachusetts senator actually "meant" exactly what he said -- that inattentive and lazy students might end up "stuck in Iraq" -- because he holds military service and ordinary people in contempt.

"In Kerry's cocoon of privilege," snarled Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman, "those who serve in our military are failures who never did their homework."

Leaving aside the established fact that Kerry was referring to the president and not to American troops -- and that Mehlman is a prevaricating phony -- what evidence is there to support such a slur? Not much, but there is plenty to suggest the opposite.

Unlike George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove and Rush Limbaugh, to name only a few examples, Kerry left his cocoon of privilege at Yale to face combat in Vietnam. For the past three decades he has maintained friendships with men who were under his command. Nobody who knows Kerry -- including his supposed friend and fellow senator John McCain, who played the political hack by attacking him this week -- believes that he regards American soldiers and officers as losers.

But what about Mehlman and his masters in the White House? Their accusations against Kerry sound like a projection of the inner thoughts of the Republican upper crust. Bush got a coveted berth in the Texas Air National Guard as a result of his family connections and disdained to complete his service. Cheney used various student and family deferments to avoid military service because he had "other priorities." Rove obtained a student deferment, dropped out of school and then somehow escaped induction when he was working for George H.W. Bush at the Republican National Committee. Much as the Bushes believe in war, no member of that wealthy and well-connected family has seen combat for more than half a century.

So much for Kerry's clumsy misspoken joke, which scarcely compares with the president's recent claim that he has "never been 'stay the course'" in Iraq. What would the joke have meant if spoken as scripted for him? According to Kerry aides he was supposed to say, "If you study hard, you do your homework, and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't you get us stuck in Iraq."

Perhaps it is petty at this point to mock the president's intelligence, but Bush's lack of due diligence in promoting, planning, launching and overseeing this war is so obvious, so gross, so tragic and so indisputable that Kerry's quip sounds almost too mild in comparison. All the lethal stupidity was compounded Wednesday when Bush reiterated his confidence in Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense whose failures and misconduct have outraged Republicans as well as Democrats.

Bush's endorsement of Rumsfeld deserved the attention devoted to Kerry. So did his equally astonishing statement to the Associated Press about the reasons for his satisfaction with the secretary of defense. "I'm pleased with the progress we're making," he said.

The human, economic and diplomatic cost of that bizarre attitude remains the real, central issue in this campaign. Pretending to see progress, as Iraq sinks into bloody chaos, is a sickening insult to the 104 Americans who died there last month, and the thousands killed and wounded since this disaster began.

BUSH ADMIN POSTED NUCLEAR BOMB BUILDING GUIDE ON INTERNET…

This will help to pay for the war in Iraq...

On the backs of babies, more compassionate Christian conservatism.

OLBERMAN: BUSH,NOT KERRY, OWES TROOPS AN APOLOGY

Surprise, Surprise!

I am shocked!
Evangelical And Mega-Church Leader Steps Down Amid Rumors He Solicited Gay Sex...

Bush bird gets school bus driver fired

School bus driver fired after flipping off president wants job back
The Associated Press

SEATTLE - A school bus driver fired after she reportedly made an obscene gesture at President Bush has filed a union grievance in an attempt to get her job back.

The 43-year-old driver, whose name was not released, was driving middle school children back to school after a zoo visit on June 16 when the president and Republican Rep. Dave Reichert drove slowly by in a motorcade.

From the bus, the children waved; with the windows down in their car, Bush and Reichert waved back.

That’s when the driver gave the president the finger, according to Reichert and Issaquah superintendent Janet Barry.

“The congressman hadn’t seen it, but the president turned to him and said, ‘That one’s not a fan,”’ said Reichert spokeswoman Kimberly Cadena.

Reichert later called Barry to tell her about the incident, but the bus driver had already been fired. District officials learned about the incident after the driver boasted to colleagues about it, Cadena said.

District spokeswoman Sara Niegowski said the driver has filed a wrongful termination grievance through the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. The union did not return calls seeking comment.

Niegowski said the firing was not politically motivated.

“The bus driver was not terminated for making an obscene gesture at the president. The bus driver was terminated for making an obscene gesture in view of the students,” Niegowski said. “That’s not the role modeling we need for our students.”

A Hevesi Heresy
Daring to doubt the governor's wisdom

George Pataki has run a scandal-ridden administration for 12 years, without the slightest punishment—and yet he and his party are calling Alan Hevesi to task about ethics. This week, Tom Robbins and Wayne Barrett unravel the governor's own misdeeds.

For those of you with mothers, wives, daughters, sisters , cousins or female friends...

The New York Times


November 2, 2006

Punished for Being Female
By BOB HERBERT

Bride burnings, honor killings, female infanticide, sex trafficking, mass rape as a weapon of war and many other hideous forms of violence against women are documented in a report released last month by the United Nations.

The report, a compilation of many studies from around the world, should have been seen as the latest dispatch from that permanent world war — the war against women all over the planet. Instead, the news media greeted its shocking contents with a collective yawn.

The war analogy is not an overstatement. In many parts of the world, men beat, torture, rape and kill women with impunity. In Ciudad Juárez, a Mexican city on the Texas border, 300 to 400 women have been murdered over the past several years. Many were raped and mutilated. The widespread belief that punishment for these crimes was unlikely was a “key factor” in their occurrence, the report said.

Each year thousands of wives in India are murdered and maimed — many of them doused with kerosene and set ablaze — by husbands dissatisfied by the size of their dowries or angry about their wives’ behavior. In Ethiopia, the abduction and rape of young girls is a commonplace way to obtain a bride. In many instances the parents agree to the marriage, believing that the raped child is no longer fit to marry anyone else.

In Pakistan, a woman cannot legally prove that she was raped unless four “virtuous” Muslim men testify that they witnessed the attack. Without those four witnesses, the woman herself is vulnerable to prosecution for fornication or adultery.

While it’s undoubtedly true that men maim and kill other men in astonishing numbers, what I’m talking about here is the way that women, by the millions, are systematically targeted for attack because they are women.

In some cases the sexual violence comes in vast, sickening waves. Just think, for example, of Darfur, Congo, Sudan and the former Yugoslavia. As the report noted, “The incidence of violence against women in armed conflict, particularly sexual violence, including rape, has been increasingly acknowledged and documented.”

More than 130 million girls and women are living with the consequences of genital mutilation, and many others have died from this barbaric practice. Jessica Neuwirth, the president of Equality Now, an international women’s rights organization, said, “Everyone who’s been cut knows someone who died from the cutting. They die from bleeding, or later from infection, or sometime later in life they have enormous health problems.”

The litany of serious abuses against women and girls can seem endless: child marriages, forced marriages, kidnapping and forced prostitution, sex slavery. According to the U.N. report, “A study in India estimated that prenatal sex selection and infanticide have accounted for half a million missing girls per year for the past two decades.”

The most common form of serious abuse against women and girls around the globe is violence by intimate partners. Huge percentages of female murder victims, even in such developed countries as Australia, Canada, Israel and the United States, are killed by current or former husbands or boyfriends.

A study of young, female murder victims in the U.S. found that homicide was the second leading cause of death for girls 15 to 18, and that 78 percent of all the homicide victims in the study had been killed by an acquaintance or intimate partner.

The U.N. report tells us what we should already have concluded: that this pervasive violence against women, “whether perpetrated by the state and its agents, or by family members or strangers, in the public or private sphere, in peacetime or in times of conflict,” is unacceptable.

Not only are we not doing enough to counter this wholesale destruction of the lives of so many women and girls, we’re not even paying close attention. There are women’s movements in even the smallest countries fighting against the violence and other forms of abuse. But they are underfunded and get very little support from those in a position to help. (Even in Afghanistan under the Taliban there were women who ran underground schools, and girls who risked their lives to go to them.)

There was a time when activists cried out for our consciousness to be raised. It’s not too late. We can start by recognizing that the systematic subordination and brutalization of women and girls around the world is, in fact, occurring — and that we need to do something about it.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

Panama named for U.N. seat by Venezuela, Guatemala

By Daniel Trotta1 hour, 24 minutes ago

Breaking a deadlock, Guatemala and Venezuela on Wednesday chose Panama as a
consensus candidate and withdrew from the race for a seat on the U.N.
Security
Council, Ecuador's U.N. ambassador said.

"They have agreed that Panama will be the country that will replace them as
a candidate for the Security Council," said Ecuador's Diego Cordovez, who
hosted
talks between the foreign ministers of Guatemala and Venezuela.

The 35-member Latin American and Caribbean group must still approve the
choice after which the U.N. General Assembly has to vote. But the decision
by Foreign
Ministers Gert Rosenthal of Guatemala and Nicolas Maduro of Venezuela is
expected to stand.

Guatemala, backed by the United States, led Venezuela by about 25 votes in
all but one of the 47 rounds of balloting. The voting began on October 16
and
ran for five days. But Guatemala fell short of a required two-thirds
majority in the 192-member U.N. General Assembly to secure the seat.

The 47th round was conducted on Tuesday and a new vote is scheduled in the
assembly next Tuesday.

Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has called the contest a campaign against
U.S. dominance over developing nations.

Although Venezuela is a major oil supplier to the United States, ties have
deteriorated, particularly since Chavez described Washington as his No. 1
enemy
and called President George W. Bush "the devil" in a General Assembly speech
in September. Diplomats said that cost him votes.

"Panama appreciates the consideration from both the Venezuelan and Guatemala
governments," its U.N. ambassador, Ricardo Alberto Arias told Reuters.

Panama, diplomats said, was not mentioned until late in the day of talks
between Guatemala and Venezuela. Other potential candidates included
Barbados,
Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic and Uruguay.

Maduro told reporters that "Venezuela will continue to try for the
democratization of the United Nations."

He said it was necessary to have "a system that serves peace, that worked
for the entire world and not one power," a reference to the United States.

Guatemala's Rosenthal, who had been campaigning for the seat for four years,
called U.S. support "a double-edged sword."

"In some ways it probably damaged our campaign, in others it helped,"
Rosenthal told reporters.

But Rosenthal aid Panama was a nation that united Central America and South
America.

"We are concerned about the idea of divisions between the north and the
south of Latin America and would like to put the idea to rest by seeking a
country
that is well received at both ends of our continent," Rosenthal said.

The United States, Russia, Britain, France and China hold permanent seats on
the Security Council, the most powerful U.N. body. Ten other nations sit on
the council for two-year terms, five elected each year.

Guatemala and Venezuela were vying for the Latin American seat that
Argentina will vacate on December 31. Peru stays on the council until the
end of 2007
along with the Congo Republic, Ghana, Qatar and Slovakia.

In other regions, South Africa, Indonesia, Italy and Belgium received the
necessary votes on October 16 to win two-year terms in the council. They
replace
Tanzania, Japan, Denmark and Greece.

(Additional reporting by Chris Aspin in Mexico City.)

Copyright © 2006 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved.

Posted by Miriam V.

What "benchmark" is this ?

Signs of progress...into hell.

You're Doing a Hell of A Job, Rummy

State of denial? This guy's on LSD...

Why the Wars Go On. . . on the basest reason of all.
by William S. Lind

America's Adrianople
by William S. Lind

The third and final act in the national tragedy that is the Bush administration may soon play itself out. The Okhrana reports increasing indications of "something big" happening between the election and Christmas. That could be the long-planned attack on Iran.

An attack on Iran will not be an invasion with ground troops. We don’t have enough of those left to invade Ruritania. It will be a "package" of air and missile strikes, by U.S. forces or Israel. If Israel does it, there is a possibility of nuclear weapons being employed. But Israel would prefer the U.S. to do the dirty work.

That this would constitute folly piled on top of folly is no deterrent to the Bush administration. Like the French Bourbons, it forgets nothing and it learns nothing. It takes pride in not adapting. Or did you somehow miss George W. Bush’s declaration of Presidential Infallibility? It followed shortly after the visit to the aircraft carrier with the "Mission Accomplished" sign.

The Democrats taking either or both Houses of Congress, if it happens, will not make any difference. They would rather have the Republicans start and lose another war than prevent a national disaster. Politics comes first and the country second.

Many of the consequences of a war with Iran are easy to imagine. Oil would soar to at least $200 per barrel if we could get it. Gas shortages would bring back the gas lines of 1973 and 1979. Our European alliances would be stretched to the breaking point if not beyond it. Most people outside the Bushbubble can see all this coming.

What I fear no one forsees is a substantial danger that we could lose the army now deployed in Iraq. I have mentioned this in previous columns, but I want to go into it here in more detail because the scenario may soon go live.

Well before the second Iraq war started, I warned in a piece in The American Conservative that the structure of our position in Iraq could lead to that greatest of military disasters, encirclement. That is precisely the danger if we go to war with Iran.

The danger arises because almost all of the vast quantities of supplies American armies need come into Iraq from one direction, up from Kuwait and other Gulf ports in the south. If that supply line is cut, our forces may not have enough stuff, especially fuel, to get out of Iraq. American armies are incredibly fuel-thirsty, and though Iraq has vast oil reserves, it is short of refined oil products. Unlike Guderian’s Panzer army on its way to the Channel coast in 1940, we could not just fuel up at local gas stations.

There are two ways our supply lines from the south could be cut if we attack Iran. The first is by Shiite militias including the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigades, possibly supported by a general Shiite uprising and, of course, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards (the same guys who trained Hezbollah so well).

The second danger is that regular Iranian Army divisions will roll into Iraq, cut our supply lines and attempt to pocket us in and around Baghdad. Washington relies on American air power to prevent this, but bad weather can shut most of that air power down.

Unfortunately, no one in Washington and few people in the U.S. military will even consider this possibility. Why? Because we have fallen victim to our own propaganda. Over and over the U.S. military tells itself, "We’re the greatest! We’re number one! No one can defeat us. No one can even fight us. We’re the greatest military in all of history!"

It’s bull. The U.S. armed forces are technically well-trained, lavishly resourced Second Generation militaries. They are being fought and defeated by Fourth Generation opponents in both Iraq and Afghanistan. They can also be defeated by Third Generation enemies who can observe, orient, decide and act more quickly than can America’s vast, process-ridden, Powerpoint-enslaved military headquarters. They can be defeated by strategy, by stratagem, by surprise and by preemption. Unbeatable militaries are like unsinkable ships. They are unsinkable until someone or something sinks them.

If the U.S. were to lose the army it has in Iraq, to Iraqi militias, Iranian regular forces, or a combination of both (the most likely event), the world would change. It would be our Adrianople, our Rocroi, our Stalingrad. American power and prestige would never recover.

When Republicans Implode - The Party of Fear Gets Scared
by Ari Melber

Kerry: I won't let them Swift-boat me again

At a press conference in Seattle this afternoon, John Kerry said -- and showed -- that he's learned a thing or two since he was Swift-boated out of the presidency in 2004. Pushing back hard against GOP criticism of words he uttered in Southern California Monday, Kerry said that he's learned a lesson "deep and hard": A Democrat can never give "one ounce of daylight" to Republicans who want to "spread their lies."

Kerry said that he "botched" a "joke" when he said Monday that "if you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well," but that if you don't "you get stuck in Iraq." But he insisted that the White House and its Republican allies knew full well what he meant: Not that members of the U.S. military are stupid or uneducated, but that the president and his people might be.

"This president and his administration didn't do their homework," Kerry said. "They didn't study what would happen in Iraq. They didn't study and listen to the people who were the experts and would have told them. And they know that's what I was talking about yesterday."

Kerry was just getting started.

"I think Americans are sick and tired of this game. These Republicans are afraid to stand up and debate a real veteran on this topic. And they're afraid to debate -- you know, they want to debate strawmen because they're afraid to debate real men. Well, we're going to have a real debate in this country about this policy. The bottom line is: These Republicans want to distort this policy. And, this time, it won't work because we are going to stay in their face with the truth. No Democrat is going to be bullied by these people, by these kinds of attacks that have no place in American politics. It's time to set our policy correct. They have a stand-still-and-lose policy in Iraq, and they have a cut-and-run policy in Afghanistan. And the fact is, our troops, who have served heroically, who deserve better, deserve leadership that is up to their sacrifice -- period."

Asked about John McCain's criticisms of his remarks, Kerry said that McCain knows what he really meant. "John McCain ought to ask for an apology from Dick Cheney for misleading America," he said. "He ought to ask for an apology from the president for lying about the nuclear program in Africa. He ought to ask for an apology for once again a week ago referring to al-Qaida as being the central problem in Iraq, when al-Qaida is not the central problem. Enough is enough. I'm not going to stand for these people trying to shift the topic and make it politics. America deserves a real discussion about real policy. And that's what this election is going to be about next Tuesday."

Minutes after Kerry's staff circulated a transcript of his press conference, the Republican National Committee responded with a blast e-mail under its "America Weakly" banner. The headline: "Kerry Apologizes to No One: 2004 Dem Presidential Nominee John Kerry Refuses to Apologize for Belittling U.S. Troops."

-- Tim Grieve

Snow: President Bush Has ‘Actually Taken The Lead’ On Climate Change

Today White House Press Secretary Tony Snow stated that “contrary to stereotype,” President Bush has been “actively engaged in trying to fight climate change.” He also took issue with a reporter’s comment that the United States has been absent from a global emissions and cap trade program, arguing that the Bush administration has “actually taken the lead on those kinds of innovations.”

President Bush has taken very little real action to fight climate change and even refuses to admit that it is manmade. He broke his promise to cap carbon emissions and insists that global warming can be fought through individual “voluntary” programs.

Despite being the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, the United States has refused to participate in the Kyoto Protocol, an international agreement that assigns mandatory targets for the reduction of greenhouse gases. Between 1990 and 2004, emissions of all industrialized countries decreased by 3.3 percent, but in U.S. emissions grew by almost 16 percent in that same period and now accounts for approximately two-fifths of the industrialized world’s greenhouse gases.

The rest of the world is leading and the Bush administration isn’t following.