Phony Populism:

Noam Scheiber has a fun article, called "The Curious Appeal of Phony Populism" in the recent edition of The New Republic that's just plain fun to read. Fans of NBC's Law & Order might not find it quite as humorous as I do.


Hot in the Bookstores:

Former CIA chief George Tenet's At the Center of the Storm attempts to paint a picture of Tenet's oversite in such a way that he will come off as a good guy no matter who wins election in 2008. Most of the discussion about the book focusses on 9/11 and the faulty info used to justify Bush's war in Iraq, but those who've seen advanced copies of the book point out that it reveals other interesting information, such as an attempt to assisinate VP Al Gore in 1998. Gore is currently the one person most Democrats would like to see run for the presidency in 2008, but he says he's not running.

What We Learned This Week:

Virginia does not follow federal gun laws. If gun dealers in the state of Virginia had followed federal gun laws, "the Virginia Tech gunman Seung-Hui Cho should have been prohibited from buying a gun."

The best way to create a united and peaceful Iraq is to erect a 12-foot, 3-mile wall through Baghdad: The New York Times reports that the U. S. military is "building a 12-foot-high, three-mile-long wall separating a historic Sunni enclave from Shiite neighborhoods." According to the Times, the best military minds have decided that “the wall is one of the centerpieces of a new strategy by coalition and Iraqi forces to break the cycle of sectarian violence.” In other words, lock everybody up before they can harm someone else.

A database run by the Agricultural Department made the social security numbers of tens of thousands of citizens freely available to anyone who might want to make use of them for any purposes whatsoever over a period of many years. According to The New York Times, "Officials at the department and at the Census Bureau, which maintains the database where the personal information was listed, were evidently unaware that it contained Social Security numbers." The problem was discovered when a farmer from Illinois Googled the name of his farm. Evidently, no one in Washington is yet aware of or knows how to use the Google search engine. Why does that not surprise us?

The rich get richer, while the working class keeps making the rich even more rich than they are. The New York Times reports a spokesperson for the Obama campaign as stating,

“Americans know there is a difference between keeping taxes as low as possible on the middle class, and giving away the bank to the wealthiest Americans,” said Bill Burton, a spokesman for Mr. Obama. “If President Bush’s tax cuts are extended, the wealthiest 1 percent will save more than the bottom 80 percent combined, at a cost of $1 trillion over 10 years.”

The Bush tax cuts are set to expire in 2010.

President Bush is likely to accept Attorney General Aleberto Gonzales's resignation in the near future. We know this because the president has been highly visible in his support of the embattled AG, whose inneptitude has been frequently displayed in the past few days. Bush usually voices very strong support publicly before telling an appointee to take a hike.

More corruption connected with President Bush. The Washington Post reports that a program that is part of the notoriously ineffective "No Child Left Behind" law has been used to scam people to the tune of at least $1 million through textbook and testing sales.

Tom DeLay appeared on The Charlie Rose show this week and stated the problem Virginia Tech wasn't that the gun laws are too week but that there were gun laws at all. He argued that everyone should have a right to carry a concealed weapon and that if that were the case the teacher would have shot the murderer before he'd had the chance to shot so many people himself. That argument naturally pressumes that the teacher 1) would have been carrying a weapon, 2) would be able to respond quickly enough to stop the murderer, 3) could shoot well enough to have hit and disabled his target (most people can't hit the broad side of a barn with a hand gun), and 4) that everyone else in the classroom was not carrying a concealed weapon. Maybe they all should have been. We can see how well that works out in Baghdad.

Prize for the Best Story of the Week goes to:

Tim Grieve's "War Room" at Salon.com. You just cannot miss this must read article. Bush at his best with America's high school students.

Hot Topics:

Maureen Dowd reveals Paul "Wolfie" Wolfowitz's girl friend's new salary in her column today: $193,590. That turns out to be a couple of bucks more than Condi Rice is earning. Wolfie wants to know what all the fuss is about. Evidently this sort of behavior is commonplace in the Bush administration. The commander-in-chief likes to surround himself with a motherly wall of adoring ladies, whose abilities, as it turns out, bear proof of the Peter Principal in all things but protecting their bouncing baby boy from the harsh truth of reality.

Joris Evers at ZDNet recently wrote about the theft of two laptop computers from the Chicago Public Schools, containing the Social Security numbers of some 40,000 employees. Seems the laptops were taken out of the administrative offices and, while the thief has not yet been apprehended, he was captured on surveillance video. The big question has to be why were all those Social Security numbers being warehoused on laptops in the first place?

Was it really that long ago or that much of a problem when it was illegal to use Social Security numbers for anything other than what they were intended for?

Now we know why the Bush administration wants to take a middle road on the illegal alien issue: They put out a help wanted sign for the position of War Czar and nobody applied for the job. At least five former generals turned the position down. Evidently there are some things that even former generals refuse to do. According to The Washington Post, retired Marine Gen. Jack Sheehan said, “The very fundamental issue is, they don’t know where the hell they’re going.” Funny, the rest of us seem to know where they are going, and it involves a handbag.

So was Don Imus making fun of the girls' basketball team or was he ineptly making fun of people who make fun of girls' basketball teams? Since I've never listened to his radio show and only caught about 30 seconds of the simulcast on TV once, I have no idea where this guy is coming from. But Robert Wright has a good take on the situation in his New York Times column today, pointing out that Ann Coulter consistently gets a free pass on such behavior as she uses racist slurs to describe Arabs and Muslims. As Wright points out, Coulter doesn't have a radio show to broadcast her hate speech, but TV networks of all sorts continue to invite and, one supposes, to pay her to appear on their shows. Perhaps CNN and Fox will start to invite Imus to share the redneck buffoon point of view in the name of equal time.

In baseball parks around the country tomorrow, people will be celebrating the day, sixty years ago, that Jackie Robinson stepped across the white lines and broke the color barrier in major league baseball.

In those days, just following the war and the Great Depression, the National League was made up of eight teams, each with twenty-four players. That's 192 jobs at the major league level. On that day, only 191 white men had jobs, one less than in the previous year.

It took players and fans some time to get used to seeing teams made up of mixed racial players. Today, most of us recognize Jackie Robinson for the courage and grace he displayed and we happily celebrate our diversity. In those days, white men saw this adventure as another step to keep them down, forcing them once more to compete with a larger pool in the workplace. The story of race in this country, to a greater extent than most of us like to admit, is a story of class. Race has always been used thus. If you can play one group of folks against the other, you can control them both. They'll be so busy hating one another that they'll never look up to see who is really benefiting from the divide that the average Joe has helped to build and maintain.

Today's Top Story:

Yesterday's top story was the dismissal of all charges against the three wealthy white students, who, while attending elite Duke University, were charged with rape and other offenses. The full power of the state came down on the local district attorney in the case to protect these young men from being wrongfully charged and railroaded by an over zealous prosecutor pandering to his local constituency.

Why is this today's top story? Because every African-American in the country is saying "Where is the state when it comes time to protect their young men from this same sort of behavior?" America's jails and prisons are full of young black men, and as DNA testing has partially revealed, many of them are there precisely because the state will not insist on fair trials and proof of evidence. Not if you are black or poor.

Will Deadwood Get a New Marshall?

A firestorm is evolving from the hot spot created around the Kathy Sierra blogging issue. Ms Sierra, a tech blogger, journalist and author, was attacked recently on a site called "rageboy.com," to the point that her life was threatened. A police investigation is currently underway, and the site attacking her has been taken down.

Now Tim O'Reilly, the publisher of all those O'Reilly tech books, has weighed in on the subject, arguing for a Blogger's Code of Conduct. Yesterday The New York Times published an article on the subject, "A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs."

Much of the discussion revolves around the notion promoted on the Web that authors "own their own words" and precisely what that means in the world of blogging. Ultimately, this issue will be resolved in much the same way as it is in any other area of journalism. You can publish what you want, but you will be responsible for what you publish. So if someone posts a comment on your blog, advocating the violent overthrow of the government and you do not exercise your editorial responsibility and edit that comment off the site, you can be held responsible just like the person who posted the comment, although perhaps not to the same degree.

No Draft? Ship in the Wounded:

In an article entitled "Injured troops shipped back into battle," Mark Benjamin reports that Salon.com has uncovered hard evidence that Army doctors are downgrading the paper work of soldiers so that they can be shipped by to Iraq for "the surge." Benjamin reports that

Hunter Smart, who until recently was a captain in the 3rd Brigade, has experience preparing unit status reports. These detailed accounts showing how many soldiers in a unit are able to deploy to a war zone, make their way up to decision makers in the Pentagon. Smart says he believes brigade commanders were manipulating the reports and pressing injured soldiers to deploy to Iraq. "The unit status report is a big deal," Hunter explained in a phone interview. "You list by name and number the number of soldiers that are hurt and non-deployable," he said. "There was a concerted effort to keep those numbers down."

* * *

Military commanders "could care less about the soldier's physical and mental welfare, as long as they can shoot straight," Smart said. "Our military is stretched to its breaking point," he added. "Commanders are being backed into a corner in order to produce units that on paper are ready to deploy. They are casting the moral and ethical implications -- and soldiers -- to the side."

Of course, if there were a draft, there would be no war to ship soldiers to.

IPCC Forecasts Dramatic Changes in Climate, Now Hard Science:

The Exxon Mobil owned Bush administration will now have to work even harder to mislead us about human involvement in climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) this week released hard data, forecasting what the next century will look like, and it doesn't bode well for any of us.

However, it should come as no surprise that those who will suffer least will be the rich, like the CEO of Exxon Mobil and its lackeys in the Bush administration. You can download the "Summary for Policymakers" here.


Left Agog at Newt Gingrich's Blatant Racism:

Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich (A.K.A. Nuke Getrich) has stirred leftist (actually centerist—there is no left in the U. S.) bloggers with his blatant appeal to racism as he tests the water for a presidential campaign.

Getrich, who was run out of congress for being a crook back in the last decade, has used his boyish smile to ingratiate himself with the far right, appearing regularly on the Murdoch Empire's Fox propaganda network. Those pearlies seem to have blinded the knee jerk white supremists to the fact that they had all fallen out of love with him because of his close relationship with their arch enemies, the Clintons.

Getrich (driven from office for ethics violations) passes himself off as an intellectual who is an anti-intellectual. He's now telling audiences that the country needs to stop its bilingual educational programs because they are undermining America. John McWhorter, writing for The New Republic's Open University addresses the issue in "Gingrich Language Ideology Ghetto."


Too Good To Pass Up:

Under the Here We Go Again column, The New York Times reports that

Three months after the United States successfully pressed the United Nations to impose strict sanctions on North Korea because of the country’s nuclear test, Bush administration officials allowed Ethiopia to complete a secret arms purchase from the North, in what appears to be a violation of the restrictions, according to senior American officials.

Trying to make things work in an unreasonable world is a difficult task and requires diplomacy, something the Bush administration has told its supporters as not being necessary.

Too Good To Pass Up:

Everybody knows that the Bush administration has righteously stood up to the North Korean nuclear threat, right? Or just maybe the administration's stance on North Korea has more to do with its alliance with Rupert Murdoch and his media empire. Check out Andrew Leonard's How the World Works column over at Salon.com and his report that what's at the heart of the free trade talks with the North Koreans is having them open their media ownership up to Murdoch's ownership.

Supreme Court Decides EPA Should Do Its Job:

For one brief only slightly tarnished moment, the U. S. Supreme Court has finally stopped being the Bush administration's legal mouthpiece. In a 5-4 vote the Justices ruled that the Environmental Protection agency must "revisit its decision that it lacks the power to regulate the emission of greenhouse gases that cause global warming."

Greg Stohr, reporting on the Bloomberg News site reports Justice John Paul Stevens writing for the majority opinion: "EPA has offered no reasoned explanation for its refusal to decide whether greenhouse gases cause or contribute to climate change." However, Stohr notes that "The ruling doesn't necessarily mean the EPA will have to impose new regulations."

The Bush administration's policy continues to be that the environment is a state's rights issue, because, as we all know, air and water and all of the other elements that make up our environment consistently adhere to the boundaries that constitute our individual states.