Is Obama Black Enough?

By Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates

For all the predictable outrage Joe Biden's recent comments about Barack Obama elicited, the gaffe put a spotlight on one of the more unfortunate forces fueling Obamania. Ever since Barack Obama first ascended the national stage at the 2004 Democratic convention, pundits have been tripping over themselves to point out the difference between him and the average Joe from the South Side. Obama is biracial, and has a direct connection with Africa. He is articulate, young and handsome. He does not feel the need to yell "Reparations now!" into any available microphone.

But this is a double-edged sword. As much as his biracial identity has helped Obama build a sizable following in middle America, it's also opened a gap for others to question his authenticity as a black man. In calling Obama the "first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy," the implication was that the black people who are regularly seen by whites — or at least those who aspire to the highest office in the land — are none of these things. But give Biden credit — at least he acknowledged Obama's identity.

The same can't be said for others. "Obama's mother is of white U.S. stock. His father is a black Kenyan," Stanley Crouch recently sniffed in a New York Daily News column entitled "What Obama Isn't: Black Like Me." "Black, in our political and social vocabulary, means those descended from West African slaves," wrote Debra Dickerson on the liberal website Salon.

Writers like TIME and New Republic columnist Peter Beinart have argued that Obama is seen as a "good black," and thus has less of following among black people. Meanwhile, agitators like Al Sharpton are seen as the authentic "bad blacks." Obama's trouble, asserted Beinart, is that he will have to prove his loyalty to The People in a way that "bad blacks" never have to. Obama, for his part, settled this debate some time ago. "If I'm outside your building trying to catch a cab," he told Charlie Rose, "they're not saying, 'Oh, there's a mixed race guy.'" Obama understands what all blacks, including myself, know all too well — that Amadou Diallo's foreign ancestry could not prevent his wallet from morphing into a gun in the eyes of the police.
For years pundits excoriated young black kids for attacking other smart successful black kids by questioning their blackness. But this is suddenly permissible for presidential candidates.

Beinart's good black/bad black dynamic is the sort of armchair logic that comes from not spending much time around actual black people. As the New Republic points out, Sharpton has an overstated following among black people. In 2004, when Sharpton ran for President, his traction among his alleged base was underwhelming. In South Carolina, where almost half of all registered Dems were black, both John Kerry and John Edwards received twice as many black votes as Sharpton. But this hasn't stopped media outlets from phoning Sharpton whenever something even remotely racial goes down. And it hasn't stopped writers from touting Sharpton's presumed popularity among black people, as opposed to "palatable" black people like Obama.

The black-on-black argument seemed to be bolstered by recent polls showing Obama significantly trailing Hillary Clinton among black voters. But reading into poll numbers that way is a clever device, hatched by mainstream (primarily white) journalists who are shocked — shocked! — to discover that black people aren't as dumbstruck by Obama as they are.

What they fail to understand is that African-Americans meet other intelligent, articulate African-Americans all the time. In almost every cycle since 1984, at least one of these brave chaps has run for President. Forgive us if we don't automatically pledge our votes to Obama and instead make judgments based on things besides skin color — like, heaven forbid, issues. Joe Biden may have misspoken — and in the process probably destroyed any remote hopes of winning the nomination — but he spoke truthfully for a lot of his ilk; Obamania is rooted in the belief that 50 Cent, not Barack Obama, represents the real black America.

Back in the real world, Obama is married to a black woman. He goes to a black church. He's worked with poor people on the South Side of Chicago, and still lives there. That someone given the escape valve of biraciality would choose to be black, would see some beauty in his darker self and still care more about health care and public education than reparations and Confederate flags is just too much for many small-minded racists, both black and white, to comprehend.

Barack Obama's real problem isn't that he's too white — it's that he's too black

No Mention of "the No. 1 Domestic Terrorism Threat" in State of the Union

by Will Potter

January 24th, 2007

http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/2007/01/24/state-of-the-union/#more-203

If by now it isn't clear that "eco-terrorism" rhetoric has nothing to do
with national security, protecting civilians or even the broader "War on
Terrorism" how most supporters view it, take a look at the president's State
of the Union address Tuesday night.

John Lewis, the FBI's top dog on domestic terrorism, has said: " The No. 1
domestic terrorism threat is the eco-terrorism, animal-rights movement."
Other top level government officials have said the same, and that rhetoric
has worked its way into memos by the Department of Homeland Security and the
State Department.

The president talked a lot about terrorism and national security last night,
so one would assume that the "number one domestic terrorism threat" would
make the cut. Nope. Not even a passing mention. The president does indicate
who owns the number two spot, and it's not "eco-terrorists." He discussed
the threat of "Hezbollah -a group second only to al Qaeda in the American
lives it has taken."

If the president is evaluating terrorists in terms of the threat they pose
to human life, which I would say is a pretty fair metric, then even the most
militant animal rights and environmental activists probably couldn't even
make the Top 10: those activists have not claimed a single human life.

There's clearly a disconnect here. Corporations and the politicians that
represent them are using the War on Terror to push a political agenda, and
silence dissent, but they know good and well that the general public
wouldn't take too kindly to a State of the Union address calling activists
"the number one domestic terrorism threat." The New McCarthyists aren't
ready for that level of scare-mongering. Yet.

But if the "eco-terrorism" rhetoric doesn't have anything to do with
national security, what is it about? Money. (And politics. But most days
here in D.C. those two words are interchangeable). To put it another way,
it's about squashing those extremists who challenge the fundamental American
ideology that the dollar trumps all (including the environment and animals).
This "war" is a culture war. Bush put it crystal clearly last night: "This
war is more than a clash of arms -it is a decisive ideological struggle."

Gathered by Sylvie K
Posted by Miriam V.

"Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act Signed Into Law,"

By WILL POTTER

Earth First Journal, January, 2007, pages 8-9.

http://www.greenisthenewred.com/blog/efjournal-aeta/

After a cold and wet morning, politicians and celebrities slogged through
the muck of the National Mall on November 13, to pay tribute to Martin
Luther King, Jr. and break ground on the new national memorial in his honor.
Democrats and Republicans, Clinton and Bush, Oprah and Jesse were all on
hand in muddied wingtips and pumps, clamoring to show their support for the
civil rights leader and his once-controversial tactics.

Representative John Lewis of Georgia told PBS NewsHour, "King inspired me
and thousands of other Americans to get in the way. He inspired us to get in
trouble. But it was good trouble; it was necessary trouble. And that's why
we honor Martin Luther King, Jr. today."

But hours later, those who had spent the morning waxing eloquent about
dissent and making trouble were nowhere to be found as about half a dozen
lawmakers allowed the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act (AETA) to pass the
House of Representatives on a voice vote. Already passed by the Senate in
September, the AETA was signed into law by President Bush on November 27.

The AETA is essentially an expansion of the existing Animal Enterprise
Protection Act (AEPA) of 1992. The punishable offenses included in the AEPA
are limited to: causing "physical disruption to the functioning of an animal
enterprise" and "economic damage exceeding $10,000"; causing serious bodily
injury or death in the course of these acts; or conspiring to do so. The
AETA expands these punishable offenses to include: any damage or loss of
property associated with animal enterprise, with no minimum dollar amount;
placing a "person in reasonable fear of death... or serious bodily injury";
or conspiring to do so. It also prescribes harsher, escalating penalties.

The AETA is ostensibly meant to target underground, illegal actions
committed in the name of animal rights by groups like the Animal Liberation
Front. But underground activists won't lose much sleep over this bill. Their
actions are already illegal (and they know it); the government has already
labeled them the "number one domestic terrorist threat." And yet these
activists continue to demonstrate that heavy-handed police tactics will not
deter them. Legal, aboveground activists are the ones who should be most
concerned about this vague and overly broad legislation, under which they
could be considered "terrorists." The AETA sends a chilling message to
activists of all social movements that political opportunists can use the
rhetoric and resources of the War on Terrorism against them.

Corporations like Pfizer, Wyeth and GlaxoSmithKline joined the United Egg
Producers, National Cattlemen's Beef Association and other New McCarthyists
to rush through the AETA legislation on the very first day back from
congressional recess. It seems that the shift to Democratic control of
Congress put a little spring in their step and gave this
legislation--similar versions of which have languished in Congress since the
mid-'90s--a new urgency. The law was rushed through the House as part of the
suspension calendar, a political move used to usher through so-called
non-controversial legislation with little debate.

Virginia Representative Bobby Scott--often called the "go-to-guy" in the
House on civil liberties and civil rights issues--came out swinging in
support of the "ecoterrorism" bill. Scott, a Democrat, said that existing
laws have been "reasonably effective," but "gaps and loopholes" prevent law
enforcement from going after animal rights "extremists."

Scott failed to note, even in passing, that the existing AEPA was used to
successfully prosecute seven Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty (SHAC) activists
on "animal enterprise terrorism" charges for running a website. Ignoring
this crucial bit of information, Scott said that activists are taking
advantage of the fact that the AEPA doesn't cover "affiliates and
associates" of animal enterprises.

Disturbingly, Scott said in passing that civil disobedience could be covered
in the bill--which some other supporters of the bill have denied--but he
tried to ease public fears by saying that the civil disobedience would have
to cause disruption and loss of profits to qualify, and that "it must be
proven that such losses were specifically intended." The same congressman
who frequently praises the achievements of the civil rights movement is
suddenly standing on the House floor and advocating the inclusion of that
movement's tactics in a "terrorism" bill.

Apparently, the actions of animal rights activists aren't "good trouble."
They aren't "necessary trouble." In a different time, though, civil rights
activists weren't "good trouble," either. It's not a stretch to imagine
similar legislation being used to target civil rights activists, if only
Strom Thurmond had thought of it first. Supporters would probably have said
it was all in the name of cracking down on "extremists" like Malcolm X.
Meanwhile, anyone paying attention would see clear as day that the
legislation was meant to have a chilling effect on all dissent.

Representative Thomas Petri, a Republican from Wisconsin usually in
disagreement with Scott, said much of the same. He had the nerve to stand on
the House floor and say, with a straight face, that current federal law,
including the AEPA, has been "inadequate" in going after animal rights
activists. Petri knows full well that all the crimes listed in this bill are
already crimes, that the original bill has been used successfully, and that
the animal and environmental movements have never claimed a single human
life.

Petri and the corporations that support him call the existing legislation
"inadequate" because, in their mind, the true threat is not the underground
wing of the movement but the movement itself. The Malcolm Xes are threats
but so are the MLKs, and they know it. That's where this vague and overly
broad legislation comes into place, wrapping up civil disobedience,
undercover investigations and other non-violent activity as "terrorism."

Only Representative Dennis Kucinich of Ohio spoke up against this dangerous
legislation. "This bill was written to have a chilling effect," he said, "on
a specific type of protest." Kucinich got in a little back-and-forth with
Wisconsin Representative James Sensenbrenner about the bill. Sensenbrenner
repeatedly cited a provision of the bill that "exempts" First Amendment
activity. Thank you to Sensenbrenner and our patriotic representatives for
reminding us that there is still a First Amendment. However, saying, "This
law is constitutional," doesn't make it so. If anything, it's an admission
that the bill has serious flaws.

At one point, Sensenbrenner read off a list of quotes from animal rights
activists that he said exemplified the targets of the legislation. Kucinich
promptly noted that "those statements, in and of themselves, are
constitutionally protected speech. Yet under this bill, they suddenly find
themselves shifting into an area of doubt, which goes back to my initial
claim that this bill was written to have a chilling effect upon a specific
type of protest."

But perhaps the most disturbing segment of this whole scare-mongering
debacle was how Sensenbrenner ended the floor debate: "This is a good bill.
I think that all of the fears that the gentleman from Ohio has placed on the
record are [considered] ill-founded by practically everybody who has looked
through this bill, including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)."

The ACLU, in fact, had sent a letter to members of Congress on March 6,
urging opposition to the legislation, and the Humane Society of the US
(HSUS) sent a nearly identical letter. The biggest concerns raised in these
letters were never addressed by Congress. Yet while the HSUS and other
mainstream animal welfare groups like the American Society for the
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals were outspoken against the AETA, the ACLU
informed lawmakers in September that "the ACLU does not oppose this bill."

Why? Perhaps because there are so many other civil liberties issues
competing for critical attention. Perhaps because corporate scare-mongering
and green baiting has turned animal rights activists into political lepers.
Or perhaps history repeats itself. The ACLU has a long, venerable history of
defending the civil liberties of even the most unsavory characters,
including the KKK. Yet during the Red Scare of the '40s and '50s, the ACLU
formally barred communists from leadership or staff positions. Meanwhile,
the National Lawyers Guild took a beating for refusing to name names and
purge members who also belonged to communist organizations, but it stood its
ground.

This time around, the National Lawyers Guild was out front opposing the AETA
and the Green Scare. And this time around, the silence of the ACLU spoke
volumes, essentially giving the Green Scare the green light.

Will Potter is an award-winning reporter based in Washington, DC, who
testified before Congress on the civil liberties implications of the AETA.

Gathered by Sylvie K
Posted by Miriam V.

Miriam's Comment: So if I decide to picket a company or laboratory that is
torturing pussy cats in the name of science, I will be in big trouble!

Iraq Veterans Against the War Deployed sets up "Camp Resistance" outside Ft. Lewis!!!

Iraq Veterans Against the War Deployed  sets up "Camp Resistance" outside Ft. Lewis!!!

 

Saturday, January 06, 2007 10:24 AM

 

THEY ARE BLOGGING THEIR ACTIVITIES AT:

http://www.ivawdeployed.org/  On their blog be sure to notice the little "read more" links at the bottom of each entry.  Their dedication is awe inspiring and they are willing to do local  speaking engagements! Check it out: 

http://www.ivawdeployed.org/  A quote from the blog about the first day and night of the camp:  

"We are here, in the mud. It is not warm here...nor dry.....however, you should stand with us....in support of a man who stands up against the military mahine and a nation of millions who don't have the foggiest notion that our troops do not want to serve in this war. Lt. Watada is speaking for thousands of enlisted soldiers like Darrell Anderson and myself, a fifteen year veteran of the Army. Watada is a true leader.....leading and doing....he knows he should never ask enlisted soldiers to do things he would never do....that is part of the requirement. NEVER ask nor order your troops to do things that you wouldn't do. There are more violators of this rule in the military now, than ever (or at least in my 15 years.) Lt. Watada is not one of them...and with that, the soldiers, who have always followed good leaders....will follow Lt. Watada.. Mike, Damon, Ethan and I, slept on the rig last night...it was night one of Camp RESISTANCE!!!"

The proceedings against Lt. Watada have basically begun, and the blog is being updated.    Posted by Sylvie K.

Joe Biden's Obama drama

In the YouTube age, the motormouthed senator's not-so-clean comments may have already shorted out his '08 campaign.

By Walter Shapiro

Short of publicly appealing to St. Jude, Sen. Joe Biden could not have more dramatically signaled his distress. Asked by Jon Stewart Wednesday night on "The Daily Show" about his ill-advised putdowns of his presidential rivals -- especially a racially patronizing comment about Barack Obama -- Biden, a Catholic, responded by crossing himself. Stewart's deadpan response: "By the way, he doesn't have jurisdiction here, so that's not going to help."

Thursday afternoon, continuing his self-abnegation tour, Biden appeared on Al Sharpton's radio show to express his "regret" over the way his comments were perceived, and to reiterate his "love" for the preacher turned perennial protest candidate.

For those who may have been off participating in a sensory deprivation experiment, the Obama remark -- which launched a thousand lips -- was embedded in an interview with the New York Observer, published Wednesday, the day that Biden released a webcast formally declaring his candidacy for the White House. Here is what Biden said about Obama (though the punctuation is subject to debate, as can be heard on the audio): "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."

What may be the real storybook here is how quickly a presidential candidate can become a national laughingstock with 25 ill-chosen words. (Of course, former Sen. George Allen, once a strong prospective 2008 presidential contender, achieved the same result with just one word: "macaca." But then, Allen is terse with his slurs, while Biden is notoriously verbose.)

A symbol of Biden's predicament was that the Delaware senator could not decide which verbal sin warranted the biggest apology. He abjectly apologized to Jesse Jackson and Sharpton -- both prior presidential candidates -- for implying that they were not as "articulate and bright and clean" as Obama. Biden also gave contradictory explanations of what he meant by "clean," saying in a press conference that it was a shorthand for "clean as a whistle," and then insisting to Stewart and Sharpton that he was praising Obama's "fresh" ideas.

While a sports announcer these days would probably be admonished for calling a black athlete "articulate" (as if this were an unusual quality for African-Americans), Biden's punishment is likely to be cruelly meted out in the polls (where he is already a negligible factor) and in fundraising (where he faces a daunting prospect in corralling the $30 million that is a bare-bones price of entry into the 2008 race).

Biden, reflecting the occupational hazard of having spent more than half his life in the wind chamber of the Senate, is a classic motormouth who routinely speaks before he thinks. Yet, while Biden's remarks about Obama suggest a tin ear on racial matters, his liberal legislative record -- as Sharpton testified -- points in a completely opposite direction.

What, then, is the proper way in presidential politics to weigh off-the-cuff words against deeds? This is a serious question in an election cycle in which YouTube may emerge as a dominant communications tool -- both by allowing candidates to speak to the voters free of the constraints of 30-second TV spots and by spreading at warp speed embarrassing candid-camera campaign moments.

Two long-ago campaign gaffes, involving Jimmy Carter in 1976 and Ronald Reagan in 1980, illustrate both the risks and the rewards of constructing an elaborate character analysis based on a few words that may -- or may not -- reflect the candidate's deepest beliefs.

Having soared to the front of the Democratic presidential pack in storybook fashion, Carter, then a one-term former Georgia governor, stumbled badly when he said that he had no objection to neighborhoods preserving their "ethnic purity." Against the backdrop of the civil-rights struggle and the battle over mandatory school busing, Carter's maladroit use of the two-word phrase "ethnic purity" convinced many Northern liberals that on racial matters he was, at heart, still an old-fashioned Southerner.

What followed was a frenzied debate over whether the front-runner for the Democratic nomination was, to put it bluntly, a racist. Carter was saved by testimonials from Atlanta-based black leaders like Andrew Young. In hindsight -- given both Carter's record as president and his post-White House career -- the furor was irrelevant, demeaning and absurd. But it underscores the ease with which a presidential candidate can be demonized by his word choice.

(Department of full disclosure: I worked as a spear carrier on the 1976 Carter campaign and later became a White House speechwriter for him. But the "ethnic purity" flap occurred before I signed on with his campaign.)

Four years later, running for president against Carter, Reagan blurted out his informed scientific judgment that trees cause more pollution than automobile exhaust. Even back in the days before polar bears were thought to be imperiled, Reagan's comments touched off a firestorm hot enough to melt the ice caps. They also fit neatly into a larger pattern of breathtaking environmental ignorance by the former California governor, since Reagan had also claimed during the campaign that oil slicks in the Pacific Ocean helped fight infectious diseases and that the haze over the Smoky Mountains had curative powers for tuberculosis patients.

Reagan's handlers developed an inspired solution to the problem of an engaging presidential candidate whose head was filled with more misinformation than Dick Cheney's office. They perfected a technique pioneered by Richard Nixon: keeping the candidate as far away from spontaneous conversations with the press or voters as possible. Everything in Reagan's campaigns and much of his presidency was choreographed down to the smallest detail on 3-by-5 cards.

Looking back, Earth Day voters who recoiled at Reagan's words got it right -- this was indeed a would-be president with the environmental sensitivity of an actor turned pitchman for General Electric. In this case, the blurted words reflected a larger truth about Reagan's beliefs.

It is worth pondering what are the lessons that the 2008 presidential candidates and their advisors are likely to draw from Biden's latest display of hoof-in-mouth disease. Their natural instinct is to conclude that this is what Biden gets for veering away from bland talking points and revealing how he actually feels about his front-running rivals. If anything, for better or for worse, it may reinforce the notion that the message discipline of Hillary Clinton and other robo-candidates is the way to successfully run for president in the 21st century.

Biden's criticisms in the Observer article of both Clinton (everyone knows her but "she can't break out of 30 percent") and John Edwards ("I don't think John Edwards knows what the heck he is talking about" on Iraq) represent a hard-edged interpretation of their weaknesses as candidates. Impolitic as his words about Clinton and Edwards may sound, they are the comparative arguments that second-tier candidates like Biden probably must make if they have any chance of breaking out of the pack. But there was no strategic logic behind Biden's comments about Obama, especially if you accept Biden's claims that he was trying to praise the Illinois senator.

After George W. Bush, few Democrats want a president with a propensity for verbal miscues. But Biden, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, is also one of the most seasoned experts in the Democratic Party on global strategy and probably would have been John Kerry's secretary of state. In an ideal world, Biden's candidacy would be tested by the validity of his views on the Iraq war and domestic policy. But this is the unforgiving sphere of presidential politics -- and Biden may have crossed himself off the 2008 list with the kind of comments that caused him to cross himself on Comedy Central.

Libby Trial: Smoking Gun for Impeachment?

Libby Trial: Smoking Gun for Impeachment?

By Robert Scheer

Truthdig, Posted on February 1, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/47477/

Not all lies are created equal. It is understood that there is a chasm of
importance between little white lies and big black ones. Most would agree
that lying about a consensual sexual affair, even by the president, is of
significantly lesser concern than lying about the proliferation of nuclear
weapons as an excuse to take the nation to war.

How then is it possible that a Republican-controlled Congress impeached
President Bill Clinton over his attempt to conceal marital infidelity but
that a Democratic-led Congress will not even consider impeaching this
president for far more serious transgressions against the public trust? That
is the question that arises from early revelations in the trial of Lewis
"Scooter" Libby, Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff.

This case's importance lies not in the narrow charge that Libby committed
perjury in testifying about his role in the outing of CIA operative Valerie
Wilson; that was merely one facet of a far-ranging plot to deceive Congress
and the public about perhaps the most important issue of our time: the
prospect of terrorists obtaining a weapon of mass destruction.

The infamous 16-word State of the Union claim by President Bush that Iraqi
President Saddam Hussein had sought to obtain enriched uranium from the
African country of Niger was known to be based on fraudulent documents at
the time Bush used this and other false evidence to make his case for war.

The Libby case testimony, centered on the chicanery of the vice president,
certainly suggests that impeachable offenses occurred at the highest level
of the White House. Just how conscious the president was of the deceits
conducted under his authority, what he knew and when he knew it, is
precisely what an impeachment trial would determine.

Consider the testimony concerning White House use of former CIA Director
George Tenet in the cover-up of the president's distortions. The record is
unmistakably clear that the CIA and other intelligence sources warned the
White House before the president's speech not to make the bogus Niger claim,
and that the reference had been voided out in a previous speech. Yet, after
Ambassador Joseph Wilson exposed this fact more than a year after the
invasion, Cheney orchestrated a new deception to shift the blame to Tenet.

That is the smoking-gun revelation in the testimony of Cheney's former
spokeswoman, Cathie Martin, a Harvard-educated lawyer who still works in the
White House. Her word is that of a sophisticated and top-level White House
insider and, as described by the Washington Post, one that offers a
devastating glimpse into the moral depravity of this administration:

At length, Martin explained how she, Libby and Deputy National Security
Adviser Steve Hadley worked late into the night writing a statement to be
issued by George Tenet in 2004 in which the CIA boss would take blame for
the bogus claim in Bush's State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking
nuclear material in Africa. After 'delicate' talks, Tenet agreed to say the
CIA 'approved' the claim and 'I am responsible' -but even that disappointed
Martin, who had wanted Tenet to say that 'we did not express any doubts
about Niger.' " Tenet later was awarded the nation's highest civilian honor,
the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Certainly this deliberate corruption of the integrity of the CIA, the
nation's premier source of national security information, rises to the level
of "high crimes and misdemeanors," which the Constitution holds out as the
standard for impeachment. And can there be any more egregious example of
betraying the oath of office of the president to uphold the Constitution
than his deceiving Congress from the very well of the House on the reasons
for going to war?

The Constitution clearly delegates to Congress, and not to the president,
the exclusive power to declare war, and deceiving our representatives in
making the case for war is a far more important crime than the perjury
charge against Libby.

Testimony already has established that Libby was nothing more than a pawn
used by Cheney in the vice president's constant and ferocious campaign to
trick the nation into war -not a totally surprising quest for a man who had
served as CEO for a corporation that has profited so obscenely from the Iraq
agony.

Cheney, like some Daddy Warbucks cartoon character of old, has been so
blatant in his corruption of the nation's second highest office that we seem
to have become inured to further revelations of his evil influence. Instead
of being shocked, we are more likely jaded by even more examples of the
man's use of his office to persistently undermine our democratic heritage.
Too bad he wasn't cursed by an overactive libido.

Robert Scheer is the co-author of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About
Iraq. See more of Robert Scheer at TruthDig.

Posted by Sylvie K.

Note to Progressives: Challenge Market Fundamentalism

Note to Progressives: Challenge Market Fundamentalism

By Ruth Rosen

AlterNet, Posted on February 1, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/47466/

Women have gained the potential of enormous power in DC with Nancy Pelosi
elected as Speaker of the House. The Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues
will grow to be perhaps the largest in Congress, but the question remains:
how will these newly empowered women use their power?

Among the issues on the wish list of newly elected women, according to
Women's eNews, are women's health, educational equity and sex trafficking,
women in prison, and international domestic violence.

All are important but will go nowhere if women leaders don't challenge
Market Fundamentalism, the exaggerated and quite irrational belief in the
ability of markets to solve all problems, an economic fundamentalism that
has dominated our national political debate for a generation. Without
directly challenging Market Fundamentalism, they will ultimately fail to
improve the lives of ordinary American women and their families.

Put it this way: What do catastrophic climate change, the widening gulf
between the wealthy and the poor, America's obesity epidemic, and our
society's lack of care for the young and the elderly have in common? Each
has powerful special interests who insist that we need to let the market
work its private magic and that government action would create more problems
than it would solve.

These interest groups also block any effort to enlist the government by
invoking the arguments of Market Fundamentalism: privatize everything, rely
on yourself and expect nothing from your government.

Market fundamentalism has become like the air we breathe; we hardly notice
it. Every time George W. Bush argues for more tax cuts, he relies on the
unquestioned assumption that we all embrace Market Fundamentalism. Like
religious fundamentalism, it is based more on faith than on reason. Through
constant repetition, however, the American public has been bullied into
believing that private spending is rational and efficient while public
spending is always wasteful and unproductive. (Tell that to people in New
Orleans.)

Progressives and liberals have assumed that Americans would eventually turn
against these ideas, much as they become disillusioned with the Iraq War.
But the truth is, neither the women in Congress nor progressives outside of
D.C challenge Market Fundamentalism directly. Two decades of the reign of
Market Fundamentalism have impoverished both the language and aspirations of
progressive Democrats.

Instead, they dance around Market Fundamentalism; they try to gain support
for their cause without directly attacking the 800 pound gorilla that sits
in Congress, in our deteriorating schools, and at the bottom of the gulf
between those who hold stocks and those who wait for their next minimum-wage
paycheck.

Ideas that are not challenged or questioned become even more deeply
entrenched. We have private "security guards" who are doing the work of
soldiers in Iraq, but who are not accountable to the military. When
Hurricane Katrina tore through New Orleans, many of us imagined that the
Bush Administration's callous and incompetent failure to rescue the people
of New Orleans and to provide the leadership to rebuild the city would lead
to massive disillusionment with the Administration's market-oriented
rhetoric.

But has it? I'm not sure. Many people saw Bush's incompetence, but they also
viewed it as one more example of the government's incapacity to solve
problems.

This is a huge problem for liberals and progressives. Even if a decent
Democrat wins the White House in 2008, his or her ability to offer
compelling leadership and to propose new progressive solutions will be
limited if Market Fundamentalist ideas remain unquestioned. Ditto for the
women in Congress who think they will push women's issues on to the national
agenda.

So, it's necessary -no,urgent -that we immediately challenge Market
Fundamentalism every chance we get. Between now and the 2008 election, we
need to take every opportunity -on blogs, among political progressives -to
explain to others why this exaggerated faith in markets is so dangerous and
misplaced.

Fortunately, there is now a resource to help us make these arguments. The
Longview Institute, a progressive think tank with which I am affiliated, has
just launched a Market Fundamentalism resource page, designed to help people
recognize and refute these arguments. Longview's Fred Block, a sociologist
at the University of California at Davis, has long been articulating the
dangers of Market Fundamentalism. The plan is to steadily add new arguments
and new material, but what is already there provides plenty of fodder for a
collective assault on the irrational ideas that support Market
Fundamentalism.

Market Fundamentalism is what prevents us from having universal health care,
mass transit, affordable housing, trains that cross the nation, subsidized
care for the young and elderly, and government efforts to reduce carbon
emissions. The list, of course, is endless.

Aside from ending the war in Iraq, there is nothing more important we can do
to improve our domestic future. Ending the reign of Market Fundamentalism is
a precondition for every kind of progressive cause.

For a quarter of a century, Conservatives have tried to convince us that we,
rather than the government, should be responsible for what is known in other
industrialized nations as the "common good." If we don't attack the effort
to privatize every public service that belongs to this common good, we will
ultimately fail to move this nation in any progressive direction.

Ruth Rosen is a historian and journalist who teaches public policy at UC
Berkeley. She is a senior fellow at the Longview Institute.

Posted by Sylvie K.

The Most Important Thing You Can Do To Stop Global Warming

The Most Important Thing You Can Do To Stop Global Warming

By Tara Lohan

AlterNet, Posted on February 1, 2007

http://www.alternet.org/story/47064/

(10 links at the URL above)

It has been a winter for the record books in the Northeast and Midwest.
People are golfing in Michigan instead of ice fishing, sap is running in
Vermont, and cherry blossoms are blooming in Washington, D.C.

People are waking up to spring in January and the stark reality of climate
change.

"Hurricane Katrina blew the door open and Al Gore walked through it with his
movie," environmental writer Bill McKibben said. "Now we have to take that
education and turn it into action."

Americans finally understand that climate change is real -and it is a
problem. So, now what?

"People are ready to do something -to do something more than change their
light bulbs," said McKibben, "they understand the need for quick and
dramatic political action."

McKibben is spearheading what will be the largest public demonstration
against global warming our country has ever seen. "On April 14, instead of
doing a march on Washington -which would burn a fair amount of carbon," said
McKibben, "we will have a nationwide rally, occurring more or less
simultaneously, in all the places that people love around the country."

The goal of the action, Step It Up 2007, is to demand that Congress enact
immediate cuts in carbon emissions and pledge an 80 percent reduction by
2050.

This is not your typical protest.

"A big group of scuba divers have signed up to hold a rally underwater off
the coral reefs in Key West and in Maui," said McKibben. "Another group just
signed up to ski down the huge, but dwindling, glacier above Jackson Hole;
there will be people on Mt. Hood; on the levies in New Orleans' Ninth Ward;
and on Canal St. in Manhattan, which will be the new tide line if the seas
go up a few feet."

There will also be people gathered at parks, at city halls, on the steps of
their churches and schools, and the list just keeps growing. So far there
are over 500 events planned in almost every state and the project is only
just beginning.

"We wanted these to be in the sort of iconic places that would remind
everyone of what's at stake," said McKibben.

If anyone knows what's at stake it's McKibben. He wrote the first book on
global warming, The End of Nature, published in 1989. Since then, he has
been writing and speaking on the subject, but most people have been
unwilling to listen. Until recently.

"Some time last year I finally reached a point of despair about how little
was being done," he said. "With a few friends we decided to organize this
march across Vermont where I live. After five days of walking across the
state we had about 1,000 people, which was good. It turned all our
candidates for federal office into tremendous advocates for doing strong
things about global warming."

In Vermont they advocated for the same plan -an 80 percent reduction in
carbon emissions by 2050. "Our experience was that we didn't need that many
people to begin changing a lot of minds," McKibben said.

"The Republican candidate for Congress in her announcement speech in June
said she wasn't sure global warming was real and that more research was
needed," he continued. "Well, it turned out that the research that needed to
be done was how many potential voters were willing to walk for five days
across her state to demand action on this. After our march democracy worked
the way it was suppose to -she was terrific. She was the second coming of
John Muir on global warming."

Despite the success of the event, McKibben and his friends realized that
their 1,000 supporters were the largest demonstration against climate change
in the U.S. -a pretty paltry number in comparison to the great activist
movements in our country's history.

"One of the things that I realized as I started thinking about this was that
we have all the parts of a movement -the scientists, the engineers, the
economists, the policy people -the only part we have been lacking is the
movement part," said McKibben. "We are just trying to provide an easy way
for people to step into that role."

A few years ago scientist John Schellnhuber at the United Kingdom's Tyndall
Centre for Climate Change Research identified 12 " global-warming tipping
points." Writing recently for Mother Jones, Julia Whitty came up with the
13th tipping point -us.

"So what will it take to trigger what we might call the 13th tipping point:
the shift in human perception from personal denial to personal
responsibility?" she wrote. "Without the 13th tipping point, we can't hope
to avoid global mayhem. With it, we can attempt to put into action what we
profess: that we actually care about our children's and grandchildren's
futures."

Step It Up 2007 is perfect time to begin the process of shifting to personal
responsibility. It is no longer enough to use compact fluorescent bulbs and
drive hybrids.

"I've of course always been torn between the need for sudden, quick, local
action which is what this is about -and the need for longer term strategies.
I have a book coming out soon called Deep Economy, and it is about what I
think will be the long-term solution to this and it has a lot to do with
moving toward more local economies," said McKibben.

"I am trying to work on all fronts -but right now the emergency is figuring
out how on earth to get Washington to stop pretending that the laws of
physics and chemistry are somehow malleable -that they can be changed like
the tax code or something. It really is time to step it up in terms of D.C.
That's where the priority lies for the moment."

McKibben is hopeful that Step It Up 2007 can get Congress members to do
something more than they otherwise would. But it will take public
involvement.

"A lot of people all across the country must be being willing to go out in
the streets and raise a bit of a raucous about this," said McKibben. "It
hasn't happened on climate change even though it is arguably the biggest
challenge human civilization has ever faced. I think it is almost too
daunting to people to figure out how they could possibly fight ExxonMobil,
who made more money last year than any corporation in the history of
corporations."

But every day things are getting less daunting. According to the Nashville
Business Journal, the president of Shell Oil said the federal government
"should set a national standard for dealing with greenhouse gases." And
ExxonMobil announced it was cutting off funding to the "outside groups that
had questioned the link between fossil fuel emissions and global warming."
This comes weeks after it was revealed that the oil giant had been funding a
massive public disinformation campaign.

The small shifts in corporate thinking have been spurred by a public change
in consciousness that has been mirrored in the media. "Finally a lot of
journalists have felt enough courage to drop the faux-balance they have
imposed on this issue for more than a decade when they match real scientific
finding with a quote from an ideologue in some right-wing think tank that's
like the equivalent of the Tobacco Institute," said McKibben. "Public
opinion has moved far enough that they now feel the courage to tell it like
it is."

Not only has public opinion changed, but people are hungry for action.
McKibben said that the response to Step It Up 2007 has been tremendous and
the website is exploding virally. "Every day people are signing up to become
organizers and doing quite amazing things," he said. "Some of them are
people from the big environmental groups such as the Earth Day Network, the
Sierra Club, the NRDC, but many of them are people who have never organized
anything in their lives and are feeling heartsick about climate change and
not knowing what to do about it."

Congressional action on climate change in the United States will also carry
tremendous weight internationally. We are the "poster child for carbon in
the atmosphere" McKibben said, and in per capita terms we will probably
always be first in carbon emissions globally, although China is quickly
moving to the top of the list of nations.

"One of the worst things that has happened in the last six years has been
our complete abdication of any leadership internationally about doing
anything on this," he said. "It is possible that when history looks back on
George W. Bush, the folly that will be most bitterly cursed will be our
unwillingness to help China and India at the beginning of their energy
takeoff to go on a different trajectory than ours. That would be the thing
that has the most long-term damage. If we get our own house even somewhat in
order, then we can rejoin the rest of the world in dealing with this
problem. If there is any hope of international progress on this it revolves
around us being able to rejoin the rest of the world."

The good news for Americans is that the first 20-30 percent of our carbon
reductions will be "almost comically easy," said McKibben. In Europe, they
have a tougher road ahead in reducing emissions because they already use
half as much energy as those in the United States. Our initial changes will
involve making sure we don't drive unnecessarily large vehicles and we apply
already existing technology to improve automobile mileage. "It is
particularly sad that we have done so little because in many ways we have
the easiest task, not the hardest one," he said.

Here in the United States we need to change the price of energy to move away
from a world of really cheap fossil fuel, McKibben said, and as that
happens, it will make the existing technologies that we have, like wind and
solar, more competitive. It will also spur rapid investments in the next
generation of technologies.

"There is no possibility of getting this to happen until investors,
corporate planners, or even people who are buying their next home or car,
understand that the future isn't about fossil fuel -it is about what comes
next. If we can send that signal strong enough then we will see whether we
can muster the changes in technology and the changes in behavior to do
something about this," he said.

But the clock is ticking. A year ago, America's leading climatologist, Jim
Hansen of NASA said that we have 10 years to reverse the flow of carbon into
the atmosphere. "He said that a year ago -so now we have nine years
left -nine years isn't very long," said McKibben.

"It's two presidential election cycles -it is four congressional
cycles -we've got to do something very quickly if we are going to have any
hope of ending up on the right side of this thing. I think what we have come
to understand though is that this problem is so large and has such a time
element that the only way it can be solved is through political action in
rapid order," he continued.

"Of all the actions one can take, the most cost effective one, the one that
stands the most chance in making a serious dent in the temperature of the
planet, is going to this website and signing up to organize a rally and
letting your congressperson know through that action that you really care
about stopping climate change."

For more information go to:

Step It Up 2007 at:

http://www.stepitup2007.org/

Tara Lohan is a managing editor at AlterNet.

Posted by Sylvie K.

A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority, 1967

Here is some historical background for understanding today's military
resisters, such as Lieutenant Watada.

A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority

reprinted in The University Crisis Reader, Volume I: The Liberal University
Under Attack

Edited by Immanuel Wallerstein and Paul Starr

Random House, New York, 1971

Ed. note. Statement signed initially by over 100 intellectuals, issued by
Resist, 1967.

A Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority

To the young men of America, to the whole of the American people, and to all
men of good will everywhere:

1. An ever growing number of young American men are finding that the
American war in Vietnam so outrages their deepest moral and religious sense
that they cannot contribute to it in any way. We share their moral outrage.

2. We further believe that the war is unconstitutional and illegal. Congress
has not declared a war as required by the Constitution. Moreover, under the
Constitution, treaties signed by the President and ratified by the Senate
have the same force as the Constitution itself. The Charter of the United
Nations is such a treaty. The Charter specifically obligates the United
States to refrain from force or the threat of force in international
relations. It requires member states to exhaust every peaceful means of
settling disputes and to submit disputes which cannot be settled peacefully
to the Security Council.

The United States has systematically violated all of these Charter
provisions for thirteen years.

3. Moreover, this war violates international agreements, treaties and
principles of law which the United States Government has solemnly endorsed.
The combat role of the United States troops in Vietnam violates the Geneva
Accords of 1954 which our government pledged to support but has since
subverted. The destruction of rice crops and livestock; the burning and
bulldozing of entire villages consisting exclusively of civilian structures;
the interning of civilian non-combatants in concentration camps; the summary
executions of civilians in captured villages who could not produce
satisfactory evidence of their loyalties or did not wish to be removed to
concentration camps; the slaughter of peasants who dared to stand up in
their fields and shake their fists at American helicopters;--these are all
actions of the kind which the United States and the other victorious powers
of World War II declared to be crimes against humanity for which individuals
were to be held personally responsible even when acting under the orders of
their governments and for which Germans were sentenced at Nuremberg to long
prison terms and death. The prohibition of such acts as war crimes was
incorporated in treaty law by the Geneva Conventions of 1949, ratified by
the United States. These are commitments to other countries and to Mankind,
and they would claim our allegiance even if Congress should declare war.

4. We also believe it is an unconstitutional denial of religious liberty and
equal protection of the laws to withhold draft exemption from men whose
religious or profound philosophical beliefs are opposed to what in the
Western religious tradition have been long known as unjust wars.

5. Therefore, we believe on all these grounds that every free man has a
legal right and a moral duty to exert every effort to end this war, to avoid
collusion with it, and to encourage others to do the same. Young men in the
armed forces or threatened with the draft face the most excruciating
choices. For them various forms of resistance risk separation from their
families and their country, destruction of their careers, loss of their
freedom and loss of their lives. Each must choose the course of resistance
dictated by his conscience and circumstances.

Among those already in the armed Forces some are refusing to obey specific
illegal and immoral orders, some are attempting to educate their fellow
servicemen on the murderous and barbarous nature of the war, some are
absenting themselves without official leave. Among those not in the armed
forces some are applying for status as conscientious objectors to American
aggression in Vietnam, some are refusing to be inducted. Among both groups
some are resisting openly and paying a heavy penalty, some are organizing
more resistance within the United States and some have sought sanctuary in
other countries.

6. We believe that each of these forms of resistance against illegitimate
authority is courageous and justified. Many of us believe that open
resistance to the war and the draft is the course of action most likely to
strengthen the moral resolve with which all of is can oppose the war and
most likely to bring an end to the war.

7. We will continue to lend our support to those who undertake resistance to
this war. We will raise funds to organize draft resistance unions, to supply
legal defense and bail, to support families and otherwise aid resistance to
the war in whatever ways may seem appropriate.

8. We firmly believe that our statement is the sort of speech that under the
First Amendment must be free, and that the actions we will undertake are as
legal as is the war resistance of the young men themselves. In any case, we
feel that we cannot shrink from fulfilling our responsibilities to the youth
whom many of us teach, to the country whose freedom we cherish, and to the
ancient traditions of religion and philosophy which we strive to preserve in
this generation.

9. We call upon all men of good will to join us in this confrontation with
immoral authority. Especially we call upon the universities to fulfill their
mission of enlightenment and religious organizations to honor their heritage
of brotherhood. Now is the time to resist.

From a second statement issued by Resist, 1969

A New Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority

Opponents of the Vietnam War have worked to end it in many ways, some
through conventional politics, some by supporting draft resistance or
attacking university complicity in militarism. Others have carried
resistance further, destroying draft files and developing opposition within
the armed forces.

We believe that resistance to many forms of illegitimate authority is
necessary to bring health to this country and make it a constructive force
instead of a terror in the politics of nations. Therefore, we support those
who resist by

* refusing to register for the draft or submit to induction

* impeding the operations of draft boards and induction centers

* expressing anti-war views while in the armed forces, or refusing to obey
illegal or immoral orders, or absenting themselves without leave

* conducting rent and workers' strikes, boycotts, and similar direct
actions aimed at ending exploitation in the fields, in factories, in housing

* organizing against harassment by police, by the FBI, by the courts, and
by Congress

* organizing sit-ins, strikes, and any principled actions at schools and
universities, to end racist practices and direct complicity with
militarism....

Two years ago, the first Call to Resist Illegitimate Authority focused on
the war and the draft. But we cannot oppose the war without opposing the
institutions that support and maintain it. Imperialism, militarism, economic
exploitation, undemocratic power, racism: though the words may seem stale,
they describe he exercise of illegitimate authority in the United States
today. Again, we call upon all to join us in the struggle against
illegitimate authority. Now is the time to resist.

Posted By Sylvie K.

Biden Unwraps '08 Bid With an Oops! - New York Times
The New York Times

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
February 1, 2007
Biden Unwraps '08 Bid With an Oops!
By
ADAM NAGOURNEY

WASHINGTON, Jan. 31 - In an era of meticulous political choreography, the
staging of the kickoff for this presidential candidacy could hardly have
gone
worse.

Senator
Joseph R. Biden
Jr. of Delaware, who announced his candidacy on Wednesday with the hope
that he could ride his foreign policy expertise into contention for the
Democratic nomination
, instead spent the day struggling to explain his description of
Senator Barack Obama
, the Illinois Democrat running for president, as "the first mainstream
African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking
guy."

The remark, published Wednesday in The New York Observer, left Mr. Biden's
campaign struggling to survive its first hours and injected race more
directly
into the presidential contest. The day ended, appropriately enough for the
way politics is practiced now, with Mr. Biden explaining himself to Jon
Stewart
on Comedy Central's "The Daily Show."

Earlier, in a decidedly nonpresidential afternoon conference call with
reporters that had been intended to announce his candidacy, Mr. Biden,
speaking over
loud echoes and a blaring television set, said that he had been "quoted
accurately." He volunteered that he had called Mr. Obama to express regret
that
his remarks had been taken "out of context," and that Mr. Obama had assured
him he had nothing to explain.

"Barack Obama is probably the most exciting candidate that the Democratic or
Republican party has produced at least since I've been around," he said,
adding:
"Call Senator Obama. He knew what I meant by it. The idea was very
straightforward and simple. This guy is something brand new that nobody has
seen before."

Asked about Mr. Biden's comments, Mr. Obama said in an interview, "I didn't
take it personally and I don't think he intended to offend." Mr. Obama, who
serves with Mr. Biden on the Foreign Relations Committee, added, "But the
way he constructed the statement was probably a little unfortunate."

But later in the day, with Mr. Biden coming under fire from some black
leaders, Mr. Obama issued a statement that approached a condemnation. "I
didn't take
Senator Biden's comments personally, but obviously they were historically
inaccurate," he said. "African-American presidential candidates like
Jesse Jackson
, Shirley Chisholm,
Carol Moseley Braun
and
Al Sharpton
gave a voice to many important issues through their campaigns, and no one
would call them inarticulate."

For Mr. Biden, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it
was an inauspicious beginning to his first presidential campaign since 1988,
when
he dropped out after acknowledging using without attribution portions of a
speech from a British politician. By the end of the day on Wednesday,
Democrats
were asking only half-jokingly whether Mr. Biden might be remembered for
having the shortest-lived presidential campaign in the history of the
Republic.

Shortly after 6 p.m., Mr. Biden issued a written statement. "I deeply regret
any offense my remark in the New York Observer might have caused anyone," he
said. "That was not my intent and I expressed that to Senator Obama."

Under questioning from reporters at his announcement conference call, Mr.
Biden was pressed on what he meant in his description of Mr. Obama,
particularly
in his use of the word clean.

"He understood exactly what I meant," Mr. Biden said. "And I have no doubt
that Jesse Jackson and every other black leader - Al Sharpton and the rest -
will know exactly what I meant."

When he was asked, again, what he meant, Mr. Biden - known in Washington for
his long-winded ways and his love of the microphone and the spotlight -
bristled
as he struggled over the squawk of feedback and echoes.

"I'm not going to repeat everything I just said," he said. "There is a vote
that starts at 2:30, it takes 11 minutes to get to the floor. I can take one
more question but not on the subject I have already spoken to."

And after taking one more question, Mr. Biden did something entirely out of
character: He announced he was done talking.

Mr. Biden's assurances notwithstanding, both Mr. Jackson and Mr. Sharpton -
African-Americans who have run for president - said they had no idea what
Mr.
Biden meant. And both suggested they felt at least a little offended by the
remarks.

Mr. Jackson described Mr. Biden's remarks to the Observer, which also
included critical statements about the Iraq positions of two of his
Democratic opponents
- Senator
Hillary Rodham Clinton
of New York and former Senator
John Edwards
of North Carolina - as "blabbering bluster."

A wounded note to his voice, Mr. Jackson pointed out that he had run against
Mr. Biden for the 1988 Democratic nomination, and had lasted far longer and
drawn more votes than did Mr. Biden. Mr. Biden was forced out in September
1987.

"I am not sure what he means - ask him to explain what he meant," Mr.
Jackson said. "I don't know whether it was an attempt to diminish what I had
done
in '88, or to say Barack is all style and no substance."

Mr. Sharpton said that when Mr. Biden called him to apologize, Mr. Sharpton
started off the conversation reassuring Mr. Biden about his hygienic
practices.
"I told him I take a bath every day," Mr. Sharpton said.

No stranger to electoral intrigue, Mr. Sharpton was quick to offer a
political motive: That Mr. Biden was drawing distinctions between Mr. Obama
and African-American
leaders like Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Jackson, to "discredit Mr. Obama with his
base."

At the very least, Mr. Biden's remarks obscured a campaign roll-out in which
he said that Mr. Bush had "dug America into a very big hole" with the war in
Iraq and that the nation would need a leader experienced in foreign policy
to take over during dangerous times. More than that, it seemed sure to
harden
Mr. Biden's image in political circles as politically undisciplined, an
image he had been working scrupulously to change in what has emerged as a
long-term
political rehabilitation project for him.

In his conference call, Mr. Biden quoted his mother in trying to explain
what he meant about Mr. Obama. "My mother has an expression: Clean as a
whistle
and sharp as a tack," Mr. Biden said, showering more praise on one of his
biggest opponents for the nomination.

On Comedy Central, he told Mr. Stewart: "What got me in trouble was using
the word clean. I should have said fresh. What I meant was he's got new
ideas."

Mr. Biden's comments also focused new attention on remarks he made about
Indians last year, when he said, "you cannot go to a 7-Eleven or a Dunkin'
Donuts
unless you have a slight Indian accent. I'm not joking."

Before he went on television, Mr. Biden found himself sharing a stage with
Mr. Obama at a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Iraq, where he
was
noticeably solicitous to his new presidential rival as members of the
committee questioned
Henry Kissinger
, the former secretary of state. Mr. Biden chastised Senator
John Kerry
, the Massachusetts Democrat, to keep his comments short ("just one minute,
Senator, or we will have everybody else").

But he could not have been more accommodating to Mr. Obama as the senator
from Illinois began wrapping up: "I know I'm out of time."

Mr. Biden would have none of that. "That's O.K.," he told Mr. Obama. "You're
making a very salient point."

Jeff Zeleny and Helene Cooper contributed reporting from Washington, and
Conrad Mulcahy from New York.

Copyright 2007

Miriam's Comment: I know what he meant - he meant that Obama sounds white!
And that was politically incorrect, but that's why everyone thinks he's such
a promising candidate. That's why they all loved him at the Democratic
Convention in 2004.

Warner/Levin Resolution a Mistake
by Senator Russ Feingold

When the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took up the Biden-Hagel resolution opposing the President’s troop escalation proposal last week, I supported it as a first step toward ending our involvement in this war. That resolution didn’t go nearly far enough – it was nonbinding and just focused on the escalation – but putting the Senate on record against the "surge" was a small step in the right direction.

Unfortunately, the new Warner-Levin resolution that many Democrats are pushing is flawed and unacceptable. It rejects the surge, but it also misunderstands the situation in Iraq and endorses the President’s underlying approach. It’s basically a back-door authorization of the President’s misguided policies, and passing it would be a big mistake. Under the guise of constructive criticism, the Warner-Levin resolution signs off on the President continuing indefinite military operations in Iraq that will not address the fundamental political challenges in Iraq, and that continue to distract us from developing a comprehensive and global approach to the threats that face our nation.

Senator Russ Feingold's diary :: ::

Here’s a link to the resolution so everyone knows what we’re talking about. I’m going to pass over the first finding, which salutes the President as "Commander in Chief." And I’m not going to focus on finding (16), which salutes the muddled and wishy-washy report of the Iraq Study Group as "valuable." Instead, I’m going to focus on section 22 of the findings, which is nothing short of an endorsement of the status quo in Iraq and that is simply unacceptable. It rejects exactly what is most needed in Iraq – an "immediate reduction in, or withdrawal of, the present level of forces." If you vote for this resolution, you are voting against redeploying troops from Iraq. This resolution doesn’t fix the administration’s failed Iraq policy – it just takes us back to where we were before the escalation. It’s not enough to reject the "surge" if you aren’t willing to support a plan for redeploying our troops.

It’s all downhill from there in (b)2. The resolution goes on to support "continuing[ing] vigorous operations in Anbar province, specifically for the purpose of combating an insurgency."

Apparently, some people think that our troops should be involved in putting down the Sunni insurgency in western Iraq. Actually, the President’s policy of maintaining a massive, open-ended military presence in Iraq has been inflaming the insurgency in that country from the start. I support the idea of targeted counter-terrorism missions to take out terrorist elements in Iraq, but we shouldn’t ask our brave troops to remain there to put down an Iraqi insurgency any more than we can expect them to end Shi’ite-Sunni sectarian conflict in Baghdad.

That’s why I introduced legislation this week to use Congress’s power of the purse to end our military involvement in Iraq. I was greeted with a tremendous response from this community. I’m extremely grateful for it because it was evidence of how badly change is both wanted and needed. But how does the Warner/Levin resolution change anything? We owe it to ourselves to demand action that will bring about change in Iraq, not take us back to a failed status quo.

Democrats in Congress have seemingly forgotten that we were in power when Congress authorized the President to go to war in Iraq. Supporting a de facto reauthorization puts us in serious jeopardy of repeating that mistake. We also have to remember that in November, Americans sent over 30 new Democratic Representatives and eight new Democratic Senators plus a very progressive Independent to fix a failed Iraq policy. The public is craving change in Iraq and a resolution like this one will not cut it. Now is the time for strong action.

Some have argued that any legislative vehicle that could be spun as a rejection of the President’s policies would be worth supporting. I understand that strategy, and it may sound good to some. But when all the spinning is done, what we are left with is the actual text of the legislation, which is an endorsement of the open-ended commitment of the U.S. military in Iraq.

It’s time for Congress to end our military involvement in this war. We must redeploy our troops from Iraq so that we can focus on the global threats that face us.

FBI Agent: Cheney Told Libby About Plame

Remembering Molly Ivins

By John Nichols

The Nation

Wednesday 31 January 2007

Molly Ivins always said she wanted to write a book about the lonely
experience of East Texas civil rights campaigners to be titled No One Famous
Ever

Came. While the television screens and newspapers told the stories of the
marches, the legal battles and the victories of campaigns against
segregation

in Alabama and Mississippi, Ivins recalled, the foes of Jim Crow laws in the
region where she came of age in the 1950s and '60s often labored in
obscurity

without any hope that they would be joined on the picket lines by Nobel
Peace Prize winners, folk singers, Hollywood stars or senators.

And Ivins loved those righteous strugglers all the more for their
willingness to carry on.

The warmest-hearted populist ever to pick up a pen with the purpose of
calling the rabble to the battlements, Ivins understood that change came
only

when some citizen in some off-the-map town passed a petition, called a
Congressman or cast an angry vote to throw the bums out. The nation's mostly
widely

syndicated progressive columnist, who died January 31 at age 62 after a long
battle with what she referred to as a "scorching case of cancer," adored the

activists she celebrated from the time in the late 1960s when she created
her own "Movements for Social Change" beat at the old Minneapolis Tribune
and

started making heroes of "militant blacks, angry Indians, radical students,
uppity women and a motley assortment of other misfits and troublemakers."

"Troublemaker" might be a term of derision in the lexicon of some
journalists - particularly the on-bended-knee White House press pack that
Ivins studiously

refused to run with - but to Molly it was a term of endearment. If anyone
anywhere was picking a fight with the powerful, she was writing them up with

the same passionate language she employed when her friend the great Texas
liberal Billie Carr passed on in 2002. Ivins recalled Carr "was there for
the

workers and the unions, she was there for the African-Americans, she was
there for the Hispanics, she was there for the women, she was there for the
gays.

And this wasn't all high-minded, oh, we-should-all-be-kinder-to-one-another.
This was tough, down, gritty, political trench warfare; money against
people.

She bullied her way to the table of power, and then she used that place to
get everybody else there, too. If you ain't ready to sweat, and you ain't
smart

enough to deal, you can't play in her league."

Molly Ivins could have played in the league of the big boys. They
invited her in, giving her a bureau chief job with the New York Times -
which she

wrote her way out of when she referred to a "community chicken-killing
festival" in a small town as a "gang-pluck." Leaving the Times in 1982 was
the best

thing that ever happened to Molly. She settled back in her home state of
Texas, where her friend Jim Hightower was about to get elected as
agricultural

commissioner and another friend named Ann Richards was striding toward the
governorship. As a newspaper columnist for the old Dallas Times Herald -
and,

after that paper's demise, for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram - Molly began
writing a political column drenched in the good humor and fighting spirit of

that populist moment. It appealed beyond Texas, and within a decade she was
writing for 400 papers nationwide.

As it happened, the populist fires faded in Texas, and the state
started spewing out the byproducts of an uglier political tradition - the
oil-money

plutocracy - in the form of George Bush and Dick Cheney.

It mattered, a lot, that Molly was writing for papers around the
country during the Bush interregnum. She explained to disbelieving
Minnesotans and

Mainers that, yes, these men really were as mean, as self-serving and as
delusional as they seemed. The book that Molly and her pal Lou Dubose wrote
about

their homeboy-in-chief, Shrub: The Short But Happy Political Life of George
W. Bush (Random House, 2000), was the essential expos of the man the Supreme

Court elected President. And Ivins's columns tore away any pretense of
civility or citizenship erected by the likes of Karl Rove.

When Washington pundits started counseling bipartisanship after voters
routed the Republicans in the 2006 elections, Molly wrote, "The sheer
pleasure

of getting lessons in etiquette from Karl Rove and the right-wing media
passeth all understanding. Ever since 1994, the Republican Party has gone
after

Democrats with the frenzy of a foaming mad dog. There was the impeachment of
Bill Clinton, not to mention the trashing of both Clinton and his wife -
accused

of everything from selling drugs to murder - all orchestrated by that
paragon of manners, Tom DeLay.... So after 12 years of tolerating lying,
cheating

and corruption, the press is prepared to lecture Democrats on how to behave
with bipartisan manners.

"Given Bush's record with the truth, this bipartisanship sounds like a
bad idea on its face," Ivins continued, in a column that warned any Democrat

who might think to make nice with President and his team that "These people
are not only dishonest - they're not even smart."

Her readers cheered that November 9, 2006, column, as they did
everything Molly wrote. And the cheers came loudest from those distant
corners of Kansas

and Mississippi where, often, her words were the only dissents that appeared
in the local papers during the long period of diminished discourse following

9/11. For the liberal faithful in Boise and Biloxi and Beaumont, she was a
lifeline - telling them that, yes, Henry Kissinger was "an old war
criminal,"

that Bush had created a "an honest to goodness constitutional crisis" when
it embarked on a program of warrantless wiretapping and that Bill Moyers
should

seek the presidency because "I want to vote for somebody who's good and
brave and who should win." (The Moyers boomlet was our last co-conspiracy,
and

in Molly's honor, I'm thinking of writing in his name on my Democratic
primary ballot next year.)

For the people in the places where no one famous ever came, Molly Ivins
arrived a couple of times a week in the form of columns that told the local

rabble-rousers that they were the true patriots, that they damn well better
keep pitching fits about the war and the Patriot Act and economic
inequality,

and that they should never apologize for defending "those highest and best
American ideas" contained in the Bill of Rights.

Often, Molly actually did come - in all of her wisecracking,
pot-stirring populist glory.

Keeping a promise she'd made when her old friend and fellow Texan John
Henry Faulk was on his deathbed, Molly accepted a steady schedule of invites

to speak for local chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union in dozens
of communities, from Toledo to Sarasota to Medford, Oregon. Though she could

have commanded five figures, she took no speaker's fee. She just came and
told the crowds to carry on for the Constitution. "I know that
sludge-for-brains

like Bill O'Reilly attack the ACLU for being 'un-American,' but when Bill
O'Reilly's constitutional rights are violated, the ACLU will stand up for
him

just like they did for Oliver North, Communists, the KKK, atheists, movement
conservatives and everyone else they've defended over the years," she told

them. "The premise is easily understood: If the government can take away one
person's rights, it can take away everyone's."

She also told them, even when she was battling cancer and Karl Rove,
that they should relish the lucky break of their consciences and their
conflicts.

Speaking truth to power is the best job in any democracy, she explained. It
took her to towns across this great yet battered land to say: "So keep
fightin'

for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't you forget to have fun doin'
it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the
fraidy-cats,

rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get
through kickin' ass and celebratin' the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure
to tell

those who come after how much fun it was."

Gathered by Joe Harcz
Posted by Miriam V
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How Libby became Cheney's pawn

The vice president knew the intelligence for the Iraq war was cooked. So he launched his aide to smear the man who took the information public.

By Sidney Blumenthal

Few issues more agitated and preoccupied Vice President Dick Cheney in the early months after the declaration of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq than former ambassador Joseph Wilson's disclosure that the intelligence underlying the administration's central justification for the invasion was bogus. So far as the occupation of Iraq was concerned, Cheney was in a triumphal mood. In a speech before a conservative group in Washington on July 30, 2003, he repeated his rationales for the war with a sense of finality: "In Iraq, a dictator with a deep and bitter hatred of the United States, who built, possessed and used weapons of mass destruction and cultivated ties to terrorists, is no more." Behind his serene public face a distressed vice president frantically micromanaged a campaign of press leaks to discredit Wilson. Cheney even scripted talking points to aides about what to tell reporters. And he fretted about what was said on cable TV talk shows like MSNBC's "Hardball." His chief agent in this intense effort to discredit Wilson was his chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, finely attuned to his principal's wishes.

Cheney was distraught over Wilson's revelation that on his mission to Niger he had discovered that Saddam Hussein was not purchasing yellow uranium to develop nuclear weapons and that the documents that allegedly proved it were forgeries. He could have ignored Wilson, whose complaint might have faded into the woodwork. But Cheney was not trying to correct the record, but to suppress it. He knew that what Wilson had written in his New York Times Op-Ed of July 6, 2003, and what Wilson had said earlier about it at a public forum, obliquely reported, were accurate. Wilson posed a potential menace not only to the legitimacy of the Iraq invasion but also to the reelection of Bush-Cheney.

Cheney knew that the intelligence for the war had been cooked. He was not obsessed with Wilson because he was angry that Wilson was allegedly falsifying information. Cheney was not seized with a feeling of injustice or a need to inform the public of the truth. Cheney is not a fool. "Cheney knows how to read intelligence reports. He knows how to read classified information," Richard Clarke, former director of counterterrorism on the National Security Council, told me. Of course, Clarke said, "Cheney had read the reports" that disproved the administration's line. "Cheney knew it was false," said Clarke. What worried Cheney was that he was keenly aware that the so-called intelligence the administration propagated was phony, shabby and shaky. What also peeved him was that Wilson had said that his mission had been triggered by a request from the Office of the Vice President.

In the aftermath of the invasion, as President Bush swaggered in a fighter pilot's flight suit on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, the administration's sway in Washington was at its zenith. The president's poll ratings were sky-high, the Republican control of the Congress airtight and the press corps embedded. Wilson was targeted as an enemy of the state. The same methods that had been used to whip up support for the war were now deployed against the straggler. Cheney's overbearing intensity was transmitted through his chief of staff. Once again, a compliant press would be exploited to do their bidding.

Libby's obedience produced a comedy of errors wrapped inside a conspiracy. Time and again, the efficient, experienced and loyal aide told the grand jury that it was not he who told selected journalists that Wilson's wife, Valerie Plame, an undercover CIA operative, was responsible for sending him to Niger, but the journalists who, one after another, had told him about her. None of the favored reporters to whom Libby retailed the story published or broadcast it, neither Judith Miller of the New York Times nor Tim Russert of NBC's "Meet the Press." Nor did Ari Fleischer, the White House press secretary, propelled into action, manage to sell it to NBC's David Gregory or Time magazine's John Dickerson. (The Fleischer incident contains several layers of sociology. Libby had never deigned before to have lunch with Fleischer. In the Bush White House pecking order, the press secretary ranked far beneath the vice president's chief of staff. Libby, who had written a novel and prided himself on his cultural acumen, began his conversation by saying to Fleischer that what he was telling him was "hush-hush" and "on the q.t." -- a line whose provenance was apparently lost on the press secretary -- quoted from the gossipmonger played by Danny DeVito in the film "L.A. Confidential.") Libby told the grand jury lies within a lie (about being the source for reporters who wrote no stories) to sustain another lie -- that the Office of the Vice President hadn't set in motion Wilson's report -- and he was subsequently indicted on five counts of perjury and obstruction of justice.

On Feb. 21, 2002, Wilson left for his mission to Niger, where he found no evidence of Saddam seeking uranium. Before he returned, on March 1, the State Department's Intelligence and Research Bureau (INR) circulated its analysis, "Niger: Sale of Uranium to Iraq Is Unlikely." About a week later, the CIA produced its own report, based on Wilson's and other assessments, but that did not deter Cheney from declaring on three Sunday TV interviews on March 24 that Saddam was indeed trying to make nuclear weapons. Cheney was briefed on the CIA report immediately before or after his portentous remarks on television. (The CIA briefer, Craig Schmall, testified in the Libby trial that Cheney "did ask" for and "received" the report in "early 2002.")

In early September 2002, senior administration officials -- Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, launched an intensive campaign to persuade public opinion of Saddam's nuclear threat. "We don't want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud," said Rice. When the White House speechwriters and NSC staff sought to insert the Niger claim into a speech Bush was to deliver at the United Nations on Sept. 11, the CIA told them it was unproved and the charge was stricken from the text.

The White House tried again, this time to get the accusation included in a Bush speech on Oct. 7 delivered in Cincinnati on the eve of the congressional vote on the "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq." Before the speech, on Oct. 5 and Oct. 6, the CIA sent two memos warning the White House to delete the reference, and it was removed from the speech.

On Oct. 11, the AUMF passed overwhelmingly on the administration's assurances that Saddam possessed weapons of mass destruction and was pursuing nuclear weapons. The casus belli for preemptive war was at the heart of the resolution. It read: "Iraq had an advanced nuclear weapons development program that was much closer to producing a nuclear weapon than intelligence reporting had previously indicated." This incendiary line, more than any other, had galvanized the public in support of an invasion, and Congress to pass the resolution, and was based on sheer disinformation the White House had repeatedly been warned against using -- and had dropped twice. Yet it was advanced as the central premise of congressional approval, though the White House, Cheney perhaps above all, knew that it was false.

In December, Mohamed ElBaradei, director of the U.N.'s International Atomic Energy Agency, sent the White House and the NSC a letter informing them that the Niger documents were forgeries and should not be used as evidence. Feeling a sense of urgency, he made a series of calls to the White House but received no reply of any kind.

On Jan. 12, 2003, the State Department's INR sent a memo to the CIA "that the documents pertaining to the Iraq-Niger deal were forgeries." The next day, the chief INR Iraq nuclear analyst circulated a memo warning that "the uranium purchase agreement probably is a hoax."

That month, the senior African analyst for the National Intelligence Council wrote an authoritative memo that the Washington Post reported "was unequivocal: The Niger story was baseless and should be laid to rest. Four U.S. officials with firsthand knowledge said in interviews that the memo, which has not been reported before, arrived at the White House as Bush and his highest-ranking advisers made the uranium story a centerpiece of their case for the rapidly approaching war against Iraq."

Despite these numerous red flags, President Bush uttered his infamous 16 words in his Jan. 28, 2003, State of the Union address: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." A neoconservative member of the NSC, Robert Joseph, had contrived to sneak the falsehood into the speech by attributing it to British intelligence.

On Feb. 5, Secretary of State Colin Powell made the case for war before the United Nations. In preparing for his speech he discarded a lengthy memo from Libby because Powell and his people believed it was filled with unproven charges. Ultimately, however, Powell's speech still contained more than two dozen falsehoods and was exposed as based on disinformation.

In fact, CIA officers believed they had cautioned Powell against using material they had already disproved. Tyler Drumheller, CIA station chief in Europe, in an interview published this week in Der Spiegel, said, "So the first thing I thought, having worked in the government all my life, was that we probably gave Powell the wrong speech. We checked our files and found out that they had just ignored it. The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit into the policy."

On March 16, Cheney appeared on "Meet the Press," where he attacked ElBaradei's credibility and insisted that Saddam had nuclear weapons. "And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons. I think Mr. ElBaradei frankly is wrong." Three days later, the invasion of Iraq was launched.

Upon the publication of Nicholas Kristof's column in the New York Times on May 6 that described the Wilson mission but did not identify him, Cheney went into a fury. Libby was dispatched to unearth material about Wilson. He called Robert Grenier, chief of the CIA's counterterrorism unit, on June 11 and learned from him the identity of Valerie Plame, according to Grenier's testimony this week in the Libby trial. From that moment, Libby began his disinformation campaign that she was responsible for sending her husband on the mission, which was authorized by higher CIA officials. Under oath to Patrick Fitzgerald's grand jury, Libby claimed that he first learned about her identity from Tim Russert on July 10. (Grenier, for his part, was forced out of the CIA in early 2006 for opposing the administration's torture policy.)

The INR memo on Wilson, released as a trial exhibit, disproved the additional falsehood peddled by the Republican report of the Senate Intelligence Committee of 2004, which claimed Wilson had in fact bolstered the case that Saddam was seeking uranium in Niger -- a report cited by the Washington Post editorial page to label Wilson as untruthful, a crucial element in the smear campaign.

In his meeting with Judith Miller, according to her testimony on the witness stand, Libby confided that the CIA "was beginning to backpedal from the unequivocal intelligence" it had provided prewar about Saddam's nuclear program. Of course, that was a complete lie. Libby was deliberately misleading the reporter, covering up the CIA's many warnings and reports to the contrary, as he tried to get her to publish falsehoods about Wilson and reveal Plame's identity. Libby appealed to Miller's sense of justice. The CIA, he told her, was engaged in "a perverted war of leaks" against the wholly innocent administration.

In October 2003, neoconservative Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith sent the Senate Intelligence Committee a classified report, "Summary of Body of Intelligence on Iraq-al Qaeda Contacts," a farrago of disinformation that had been the basis of the Libby memo given to Powell. Feith had been in charge of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, a parallel intelligence unit that stovepiped disinformation from Iraqi exiles to the Office of the Vice President and the NSC with a stamp of approval that evaded the normal channels of verifying intelligence. Within weeks, Feith's report was leaked to the neoconservative Weekly Standard and published under the headline: "Case Closed: The U.S. Government's Secret Memo Detailing Cooperation Between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden." On Jan. 9, 2004, Cheney took it upon himself, in an interview with the Rocky Mountain News, to promote the Weekly Standard story as "the best source of information." Cheney's support for the disinformation continued through the 2004 campaign and beyond.

Cheney is scheduled to testify soon at the federal courthouse as a defense witness, where he will be questioned about his direction of the operation in which Libby acted as his pawn. Meanwhile, a few blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue, Congress debates resolutions against Bush's escalation of the war, haunted by the original "Authorization for Use of Military Force," which was approved with a naive trust that on a matter of war the president and the vice president would tell the truth.