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1. Harry Shearer: Songs of The Bushmen (videos)
- 935 Lies: http://www.mydamnchannel.com/Harry_Shearer/Music_Videos/935Lies_687.aspx
No Cooler for the Scooter: http://www.mydamnchannel.com/Harry_Shearer/Music_Videos/NoCoolerfortheScooter_418.aspx
Make New Orleans Whole: http://www.mydamnchannel.com/Harry_Shearer/Music_Videos/MakeNewOrleansWhole_414.aspx
Waterboarding USA: http://www.mydamnchannel.com/Harry_Shearer/Music_Videos/WaterboardinUSAVideo_426.aspx
2. Occupation Plan for Iraq Faulted in Army History
The story of the American occupation of Iraq has been the subject of numerous books, studies and memoirs. But now the Army has waded into the highly charged debate with its own nearly 700-page account: “On Point II: Transition to the New Campaign.”
The unclassified study, the second volume in a continuing history of the Iraq conflict, is as noteworthy for who prepared it as for what it says. In essence, the study is an attempt by the Army to tell the story of one of the most contentious periods in its history to military experts — and to itself. 6/29/08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/washington/29army.html
Download a digital version at http://usacac.army.mil/CAC2/CSI/OnPointII.pdf (NOTE: This is a VERY large file).
3. Mark Fiore: What If.... (video)
http://www.markfiore.com/what_if_0
4. Jon Stewart: Be Patient, This Gets Amazing - EPA Email (video)
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2008/06/be_patient_this.html
5. North Pole Could be Ice-Free This Summer
Arctic sea ice could break apart completely at the North Pole this year, allowing ships to sail over the normally frozen top of the world.
The potential landmark thaw - the first time in human history the pole would be ice-free - is a stark sign of global warming, according to an article Friday on the web site of the The Independent, a London newspaper. Robert Roy Britt 6.26.08
http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/20080627/sc_livescience/northpolecouldbeicefreethissummer
6. Madeleine Begun Kane: Some Friendly Advice For McCain’s Veep Vetting Team
I was shocked to learn that John McCain is computer illiterate. Well, I have just the ticket:
- Some Friendly Advice For McCain’s Veep Vetting Team
McCain doesn’t use a PC
Or a Mac, so he needs a VP
Who can act as his tutor
In using a ‘puter
And help with the phone and TV.
http://www.madkane.com/madness/2008/06/26/some-friendly-advice-for-mccains-veep-vetting-team/
7. Obama to be in San Diego for the National Council of La Raza conference in July
Both presumptive major-party presidential nominees -- Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama -- will speak at the 2008 annual National Council of La Raza conference in San Diego next month, organizers announced on Monday.
The conference, which is expected to attract 20,000 people, will be July 12-15 at the San Diego Convention Center. http://lideres.nclr.org/
8. Polls
- • RealClearPolitics Electoral College
Barack Obama 238 (146 Solid, 92 Leaning)
John McCain 163 (93 Solid, 70 Leaning)
Toss Up 137
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/maps/obama_vs_mccain/
• Americans Worry McCain Would Be Too Similar to Bush: A recent USA Today/Gallup poll finds about two in three Americans concerned that John McCain would pursue policies as president that are too similar to what George W. Bush has pursued. Nearly half -- 49% -- say they are "very concerned" about this. http://www.gallup.com/poll/108490/Americans-Worry-McCain-Would-Too-Similar-Bush.aspx
9. San Francisco may name sewage treatment plant after Bush
SAN FRANCISCO: Reagan has his highways. Lincoln has his memorial. Washington has the capital, and a state, too. But President George W. Bush may soon be the sole president to have a memorial named after him that you can contribute to from the bathroom.
From the Department of Damned-With-Faint-Praise, a group going by the regal-sounding name of the Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco is planning to ask voters here to change the name of a prize-winning water-treatment plant on the shoreline to the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.
The plan - hatched, naturally, in a bar - would place a vote on the November ballot to provide "an appropriate honor for a truly unique president." Jesse McKinley 6.25.08 http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/06/25/america/bush.php
10. Late-Night Political Jokes for Dems
- "Big ruling coming out of the Supreme Court now. They have ruled individuals have the right to carry guns. Yeah. But now listen, seriously. Don't think you can just go into a gun store and buy a gun. No, no, no. There is still a strict 15-minute waiting period." --David Letterman
"But when the decision was read, it created pandemonium, and of course Justice Scalia had to fire two warning shots to settle people down. And then at the White House, just for fun, Dick Cheney went out on the lawn and peppered a buddy with some bird shot." --David Letterman
"But John McCain, here's what he likes to do on the weekends. He sits on the porch in front of the house looking for out-of-state license plates." --David Letterman
"Oh, on this day in 1963, JFK was in Germany and he said, 'Ich bin ein Berliner,' do you remember that? Do you remember seeing it? Ich bin ein Berliner, I am a Berliner. And I'm thinking about it, now it would be nice if we had a president who could speak English." --David Letterman
"This morning, in a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court overturned Washington, DC's ban on handguns! Wooo! Finally, the residents of Washington, DC have the right to defend themselves. From each other, one assumes. Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said, 'It is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.' He is right. Killing the Constitution is the president's job. The court's job is to overturn elections." --Stephen Colbert
"The latest Bloomberg poll shows Obama has a 15-point lead over John McCain. That's a big lead. He leads in men and in women and with young people, minorities. I think the only place that McCain is beating Obama is in calcium deposits right now." --Jimmy Kimmel
"Californians now driving across the border to get cheap gas in Mexico. Here's another tip. Instead of gas, try using Rite Aid vodka. Much cheaper, and about the same mileage." --David Letterman
"Hey, there was an interesting study released today which says that people who live here in the state of California are less convinced that there is a God than the people of any other state in the country. On an unrelated note, more than 800 wildfires here in California are currently burning out of control." --Jimmy Kimmel
"John McCain and Barack Obama have both laid out their energy plans. Obama wants enough "green" energy to power the entire U.S. economy, and McCain just wants enough energy to stay up past nine o'clock." --Craig Ferguson
11. Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact
the Nobel Prize-winning organization Physicians for Human Rights has released a report, called “Broken Laws, Broken Lives,” that puts an appropriately horrifying face on a practice that is so fundamentally evil that it cannot co-exist with the idea of a just and humane society.
Download either the Executive Summary or the full text of the report which provides for the first time medical evidence to confirm first-hand accounts of men who endured torture by US personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay. These men were never charged with any crime. http://brokenlives.info/?page_id=69
12. Cost of the Iraq war (video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K8y6zEc8x5w&eurl
13. McCain Takes Credit For GI Bill He Opposed (video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1aJGaRxDCM&eurl
14. Andy Borowitz: McCain Proposes Tax Holiday for Beer Heiresses
- Presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain unveiled details of his economic policy today, telling an audience in Ohio that if elected he would support a real estate tax holiday for beer heiresses.
Sen. McCain said that his tax holiday plan could lead to a revival for the U.S. economy, arguing, "The key to this country's economic well-being has been and will always be those Americans with vast inherited brewery wealth."
The Arizona senator took great pains to indicate that the tax holiday would not be available to all brewery heiresses, "Just those with a net worth of over 100 million dollars."
Mr. McCain's real estate tax holiday proposal came on the heels of the news that his wife, presumptive First Lady nominee Cindy McCain, had failed to pay real estate taxes on her La Jolla, California home for four years.
But Sen. McCain was quick to dismiss speculation that his real estate tax holiday proposal was intended to help his wife, adding, "Anyone who is serious about fixing the U.S. economy would start with the engine of that economy, which as everyone knows is brewery heiresses."
Standing at Sen. McCain's side during his appearance, Mrs. McCain endorsed the real estate tax holiday and offered an explanation for her failure to pay four years' worth of real estate taxes.
"I guess it slipped my mind," she said. "Quite frankly, I've been busy coming up with totally original recipes for my website." www.borowitzreport.com
15. Hurricanes don’t cause oil spills!
- • Mike Huckabee: "When Katrina, a Cat-5 hurricane, hit the Gulf Coast, not one drop of oil was spilled off of those rigs out in the Gulf of Mexico."
• Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal: You know, that’s one of the great unwritten success stories, after Katrina and Rita, these awful storms, no major spills.
• John McCain: As for offshore drilling, it’s safe enough these days that not even Hurricanes Katrina and Rita could cause significant spillage from the battered rigs off the coasts of New Orleans and Houston.
• George Will: “Hurricanes Katrina and Rita destroyed or damaged hundreds of drilling rigs without causing a large spill.”
• Wall Street Journal editorial: “Hurricanes Katrina and Rita flattened terminals across the Gulf of Mexico but didn’t cause a single oil spill.”
• Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne: “When Katrina and Rita hit the Gulf Coast where we have about 4,000 oil and gas platforms, 3,000 were in the direct line of the storms - the most significant storms we’ve seen ever - and 3,000 of those had to be shut down. We had no significant oil spill. The system worked.”
• Fox News’ Dick Morris: “And by the way, the safety concerns, Hurricane Katrina didn’t cause any leakage or any spill in the Gulf of Mexico oil wells.”
VERSUS
A report prepared for the federal government by an international consulting firm, state that damages related to Hurricane Katrina resulted in 70 spills from outer continental shelf structures with a total volume of approximately 11,104 barrels of oil and petroleum products. http://mediamatters.org/items/200806270005?f=h_top
Satellite image with detail insets showing oil slicks in Gulf of Mexico following passage of Hurricane Katrina. Image taken on September 2, 2005. http://skytruth.mediatools.org/node/19981
16. Global Warming Is a Cause of This Year’s Extreme Weather
It's almost a point of pride with climatologists. Whenever someplace is hit with a heat wave, drought, killer storm or other extreme weather, scientists trip over themselves to absolve global warming. No particular weather event, goes the mantra, can be blamed on something so general. Extreme weather occurred before humans began loading up the atmosphere with heat-trapping greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide. So this storm or that heat wave could be the result of the same natural forces that prevailed 100 years ago—random movements of air masses, unlucky confluences of high- and low-pressure systems—rather than global warming.
This pretense has worn thin. The frequency of downpours and heat waves, as well as the power of hurricanes, has increased so dramatically that "100-year storms" are striking some areas once every 15 years, and other once rare events keep returning like a bad penny. As a result, some climatologists now say global warming is to blame. Rising temperatures boost the probability of extreme weather, says Tom Karl, director of the National Climatic Data Center and lead author of a new report from the Bush administration's Climate Change Science Program; that can "lead to the type of events we are seeing in the Midwest." There, three weeks of downpours have caused rivers to treat their banks as no more than mild suggestions. Think of it this way: if once we experienced one Noachian downpour every 20 years, and now we suffer five, four are likely man-made. Sharon Begley July 7-14, 2008 issue http://www.newsweek.com/id/143787
17. McCain Truth Squad defender was Swift Boat Vet member
Col. George "Bud" Day, one of the members of John McCain’s new Truth Squad — which his campaign says was launched to respond to unfair attacks on his record of military service –- was a member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and appeared in an attack ad for the group in 2004. http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2008/06/30/mccain-truth-squad-defender-was-swift-boat-vet-member/
18. Colbert: The Elitist Menance (video)
http://onegoodmove.org/1gm/1gmarchive/2008/06/the_elitist_men.html
19. From the DAILY GRILL
- "Afghanistan's becoming stable." -- Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, 6/29/08
VERSUS
"The number of civilians killed in Afghanistan has risen by almost two-thirds in the first half of the year compared with 2007, UN figures showed today.. The figures, which reveal that almost 700 civilians have died, show that the instability and violence afflicting the country are taking an increasing toll on ordinary Afghans." -- The Guardian, 6/30/08
"I don't think the federal government of the United States needs to get involved." -- White House Press Secretary Dana Perino, on Iraqi oil contract negotiations. 6/25/08
VERSUS
"A group of American advisers led by a small State Department team played an integral part in drawing up contracts between the Iraqi government and five major Western oil companies to develop some of the largest fields in Iraq, American officials say." -- NY Times, 6/30/08
"All other goals -- including...reform of de-Baathification and disarmament laws...were rated 'satisfactory.'" -- Washington Post on a U.S. Embassy report about Iraq. 7/2/08
VERSUS
"[I]mplementation of the [de-Baathification] law is bogged down by infighting between politicians. ... The government has still not appointed a seven-member panel to replace the de-Baathification Committee." -- Reuters, 6/17/08
20. Study: Most Children Strongly Opposed To Children’s Healthcare (video)
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/study_most_children_strongly
21. Pentagon fights EPA on pollution cleanup
The Defense Department, the nation's biggest polluter, is resisting orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up Fort Meade and two other military bases where the EPA says dumped chemicals pose "imminent and substantial" dangers to public health and the environment.
The Pentagon has also declined to sign agreements required by law that cover 12 other military sites on the Superfund list of the most polluted places in the country. The contracts would spell out a remediation plan, set schedules, and allow the EPA to oversee the work and assess penalties if milestones are missed.
The actions are part of a standoff between the Pentagon and environmental regulators that has been building during the Bush administration, leaving the EPA in a legal limbo as it addresses growing concerns about contaminants on military bases that are seeping into drinking water aquifers and soil. Lyndsey Layton 6.30.08 http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25450859/
22. New high for Afghanistan deaths
A roadside bomb killed three service members and a local-national interpreter in a coalition convoy in eastern Afghanistan, the U.S.-led coalition said.
With the deaths, the number of foreign forces in Afghanistan killed in June has reached 39, the highest monthly toll of the war, according to a CNN count of official figures.
The bombing occurred Thursday in the Sayed Abad District in Wardak province during a combat patrol. 6.26.08
http://cnnwire.blogs.cnn.com/2008/06/26/new-high-for-afghanistan-deaths/
23. Baghdad Walls Keep Peace, But Evoke Prison
Rows after rows of barrier walls divide the city into smaller and smaller areas that protect people from bombings, sniper fire and kidnappings. They also lead to gridlock, rising prices for food and homes, and complaints about living in what feels like a prison.
Baghdad's walls are everywhere, turning a riverside capital of leafy neighborhoods and palm-lined boulevards where Shiites and Sunnis once mingled into a city of shadows separating the two Muslim sects.
The walls block access to schools, mosques, churches, hotels, homes, markets and even entire neighborhoods - almost anything that could be attacked. For many Iraqis, they have become the iconic symbol of the war. 6.27.08 http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/06/27/iraq/main4214647.shtml
24. U.N. Finds Afghan Opium Trade Rising
Afghan opium poppy cultivation grew 17 percent last year, continuing a six-year expansion of the country's drug trade and increasing its share of global opium production to more than 92 percent, according to the 2008 World Drug Report, released Thursday by the United Nations.
Afghanistan's emergence as the world's largest supplier of opium and heroin represents a serious setback to U.S. policy in the region. The opium trade has soared since the U.S.-led 2001 overthrow of the Taliban, which had eradicated almost all of the country's opium poppies. The proceeds from the illicit trade are helping finance a resurgent Taliban that is battling U.S. and allied troops. Colum Lynch 6.27.08 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/26/AR2008062601813.html
25. A Win by McCain Could Push a Split Court to Right
As justices finished their work last week, two overarching truths about the court remained unchanged: It is sharply divided ideologically on some of the most fundamental constitutional questions, and the coming presidential election will determine its future path.
A victory by the presumptive Democratic nominee, Barack Obama, would probably mean preserving the uneasy but roughly balanced status quo, since the justices who are considered most likely to retire are liberal. A win for his Republican counterpart, John McCain, could mean a fundamental shift to a consistently conservative majority ready to take on past court rulings on abortion rights, affirmative action and other issues important to the right. Robert Barnes, 6.29.08 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/28/AR2008062802078.html
26. Bobbing in poison soup
On the first of June, two men and a rabbit set sail from the port of Long Beach, bound for Hawaii, on a raft made of junk. Their cabin is the cockpit of a Cessna 310, white with a blue racing stripe, salvaged from the desert. It floats on a system of handmade pontoons -- 15,000 plastic bottles held together with recycled nets -- propelled by currents and wind. If it sounds dangerous and makeshift, that's the point. The pilots of Junk, as the vessel is called, want to get your attention. Their cause is alerting the world to the fouling of our oceans by plastic debris, and Junk is the poster child. See http://www.junkraft.blogspot.com/
Check out the CBS Video Sea Of Trash at http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=591802n
27. Seymour Hersh On U.S. Covert Operations In Iran (video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4FkZfRXLGA&eurl
28. The press and General Clark
So: The latest round of mock outrage—in a presidential race that has turned the tactic into an art form—now comes in response to comments made by General Wesley Clark (video).
- • MSNBC's Novotny falsely claimed Clark "blasted McCain's military record" -- http://mediamatters.org/items/200806300006?f=h_top
• Fox's Henneberg deceptively cropped Clark interview while claiming Clark "seemed to attack McCain's military service" -- http://mediamatters.org/items/200806300001?f=h_top
• CNN's American Morning deceptively cropped Clark interview. -- http://mediamatters.org/items/200806300004?f=h_top
• All three network evening newscasts misrepresented retired Gen. Wesley Clark's comments about Sen. John McCain on Face The Nation, with none noting that Clark praised McCain as a "hero" for his Vietnam war service. -- http://mediamatters.org/items/200807010001?f=h_top
• Fox News' Shawn falsely claimed, "General Clark said that Mr. McCain does not serve in a wartime squadron" -- http://mediamatters.org/items/200806300008?f=h_top
29. Wesley Clark Stands His Ground (video)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybBb2tUQtvI&eurl
30. Andrew Sullivan: Could The President Legally Bury Someone Alive?
John Yoo wouldn't answer yesterday. But his answer has to be yes, right? Here he is in another venue:
"Cassel: If the president deems that he's got to torture somebody, including by crushing the testicles of the person's child, there is no law that can stop him?
Yoo: No treaty
Cassel: Also no law by Congress -- that is what you wrote in the August 2002 memo...
Yoo: I think it depends on why the President thinks he needs to do that..." 6.27.08 http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/06/could-the-presi.html
31. Appeals Court mocks Gitmo 'evidence' as nonsense
A panel of the Appeals Court in the DC Circuit on Monday released the first ever ruling on a habeas-like review for a Guantanamo prisoner under the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (PDF). It's devastating to the Bush administration. The unanimous opinion even mocks Bush & Co.'s argument, comparing it to a nonsense poem by Lewis Carroll.
Nearly all the procedings at Combatant Status Review Tribunals have relied heavily on hearsay allegations whose reliability the Tribunals have admitted they can't assess adequately because of government assertions of secrecy. The Appeals Court found that the Tribunal was wrong to depend on unvetted secret 'evidence' to classify the prisoner, Huzaifa Parhat, as an 'enemy combatant'. It also rejected the administration's preposterous and tortured argument that tried to link Parhat to al Qaeda. 8.01.08 http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2008/7/1/81911/86481/465/544641
32. China Inspired Interrogations at Guantánamo
The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The only change made in the chart presented at Guantánamo was to drop its original title: “Communist Coercive Methods for Eliciting Individual Compliance.”
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency. SCOTT SHANE, 7.02.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/02/us/02detain.html
33. Christopher Hitchens is Waterboarded (video)
How does it feel to be “aggressively interrogated”? Christopher Hitchens found out for himself, submitting to a brutal waterboarding session in an effort to understand the human cost of America’s use of harsh tactics at Guantánamo and elsewhere. http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/features/video/2008/hitchens_video200808
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1. Timothy Egan: The Petro-Manipulators
Anyone who lived on the West Coast during the phony energy crisis of 2000 and 2001 cannot help thinking of Texas and two of its worst products — Enron and a politician not named George Bush — as gas creeps up toward $5 a gallon this summer.
What happened during the great energy heist at the start of the new century was like an extended bad dream, part “Twilight Zone” and part “Chinatown,” the extraordinary 1974 film about water manipulation and long-buried secrets.
The price of energy spiked — tenfold, a hundredfold — despite low demand. Californians became the most efficient users of power in the nation, and still suffered through dozens of rolling blackouts. None of it added up.
And into the worst energy crisis since the Arab oil embargo of 1973 came Vice President Dick Cheney, blasting conservation as a sissy virtue and saying the nation needed to build a new power plant every week for the next 20 years.
The administration’s neglect was breathtaking, a harbinger of what was to come when a natural disaster, Hurricane Katrina, would do to Louisiana what a man-made disaster had done to California. We now know, of course, that the problem eight years ago was caused by manipulation by Enron and other speculators who gamed a faulty system, sticking it to Grandma Millie while laughing at how easy it was to rob 40 million people.
Now consider the present dilemma: oil doubling over the last year, gas at $4.50 a gallon in places and the oversized influence of speculators in a market where few used to tread. Big investors are free to run up oil futures contracts thanks in part to former Senator Phil Gramm. He is the Texas Republican who co-sponsored the so-called Enron loophole in 2000 at the behest of what was later found to be one of the nation’s biggest criminal enterprises.
Enron may be gone, but its legacy lingers in the work done by politicians who did its bidding. And Gramm, who once told corporate contributors, “I have the most reliable friend you can have in American politics, and that’s ready money,” is now the chief economic adviser to Senator John McCain. 6.25.08 http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/
2. Dana Milbank: When Anonymity Fails, Be Nasty, Brutish and Short
Throughout the Bush presidency, he toiled in secrecy deep within the White House, a mysterious and feared presence who never stepped into the sunlight of public disclosure.
Until yesterday.
There he sat, hunched and scowling, at the witness table in front of the House Judiciary Committee: the bearded, burly form of the chief of staff and alter ego to the vice president -- Cheney's Cheney, if you will -- and the man most responsible for building President Bush's notion of an imperial presidency.
David Addington was there under subpoena. And he wasn't happy about it.
Could the president ever be justified in breaking the law? "I'm not going to answer a legal opinion on every imaginable set of facts any human being could think of," Addington growled. Did he consult Congress when interpreting torture laws? "That's irrelevant," he barked. Would it be legal to torture a detainee's child? "I'm not here to render legal advice to your committee," he snarled. "You do have attorneys of your own."
He had the grace of Gollum as he quarreled with his questioners. In response to one of the chairman's questions, he neither looked up nor spoke before finishing a note he was writing to himself. When Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) questioned his failure to remember conversations about interrogation techniques, he only looked at her and asked: "Is there a question pending, ma'am?" Finally, at the end of the hearing, Addington was asked whether he would meet privately to discuss classified matters. "You have my number," he said. "If you issue a subpoena, we'll go through this again. 6.27.08 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/26/AR2008062603456.html
3. Lock and Load
Thirty-thousand Americans are killed by guns every year — on the job, walking to school, at the shopping mall. The Supreme Court on Thursday all but ensured that even more Americans will die senselessly with its wrongheaded and dangerous ruling striking down key parts of the District of Columbia’s gun-control law.
In a radical break from 70 years of Supreme Court precedent, Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority, declared that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to bear arms for nonmilitary uses, even though the amendment clearly links the right to service in a “militia.” The ruling will give gun-rights advocates a powerful new legal tool to try to strike down gun-control laws across the nation.
This is a decision that will cost innocent lives, cause immeasurable pain and suffering and turn America into a more dangerous country. It will also diminish our standing in the world, sending yet another message that the United States values gun rights over human life. 6.27.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/opinion/27fri1.html
4. Erwin Chemerinsky: Judicial activism by conservatives
The Supreme Court's invalidation of the District of Columbia's handgun ban powerfully shows that the conservative rhetoric about judicial restraint is a lie. In striking down the law, Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion, joined by the court's four other most conservative justices, is quite activist in pursuing the conservative political agenda of protecting gun owners.
If the terms "judicial activism" and "judicial restraint" have any meaning, it is that a court is activist when it is invalidating laws and overruling precedent, and restrained when deferring to popularly elected legislatures and following prior decisions.
Never before had the Supreme Court found that the 2nd Amendment bestows on individuals a right to have guns. In fact, in 1939 (and other occasions), the court rejected this view. In effectively overturning these prior decisions, the court both ignored precedent and invalidated a law adopted by a popularly elected government.
What's more, the court's interpretation is questionable. The text of the 2nd Amendment is ambiguous. Its second clause speaks of a right to "keep and bear arms," but its first clause suggests that this right exists because a "well-regulated militia" is essential. There is thus strong reason to believe that the 2nd Amendment only guarantees gun rights for those serving in a militia.
At the very least, one would expect that a high court committed to judicial restraint would have used the 2nd Amendment's ambiguity to defer to the political process and to follow precedent. Yet nowhere in Scalia's opinion was there mention of the need for judicial deference that is so characteristic of his opinions in cases involving other individual liberties. 6.27.08 http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-chemerinsky27-2008jun27,0,6464156.story
5. Mike Davis: Living on the Ice Shelf - Humanity's Meltdown
Contemporary stratigraphers have set extraordinarily rigorous standards for the beatification of any new geological divisions. Although the idea of the "Anthropocene" -- an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force -- has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent.
At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised.
To the question "Are we now living in the Anthropocene?" the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer "yes." They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch -- the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization -- has ended and that the Earth has entered "a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years." In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which "now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude," the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.
This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that "the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks." Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory. 6.26.08 http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174949/mike_davis_welcome_to_the_next_epoch
6. Augustine Faucher: Economy bodes ill wind for McCain
HISTORICALLY, ECONOMIC conditions have played an enormous role in presidential elections, even as other factors come into play. Economic downturns are bad news for the incumbent, while expansions tend to lead to reelection. Franklin D. Roosevelt unseated Herbert Hoover in the depth of the Great Depression in 1932. Boom times helped reelect Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Bill Clinton in 1996. For all the money and time and effort that go into campaigning, the results of presidential elections often seem to track basic economic conditions.
My employer, Moody's Economy.com, has developed a model to predict the outcome of the vote in each state, based on economic conditions at the time of the election. The results forecast the Electoral College vote. And as of June, the model is predicting a big victory for the Democrat, Senator Barack Obama. 6.28.08 http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/editorial_opinion/oped/articles/2008/06/28/economy_bodes_ill_wind_for_mccain/
7. More Waste, Fraud and Abuse
Representative Henry Waxman recently asked a question for which we would also like an answer: “How did a company run by a 21-year-old president and a 25-year-old former masseur get a sensitive $300 million contract to supply ammunition to Afghan forces?” Mr. Waxman raised the issue after executives of a Miami Beach arms dealer, AEY, were indicted on fraud charges this month, accused of pawning off tens of millions of banned and decrepit Chinese cartridges on the United States Army to supply Afghan security forces.
How, indeed, could such scheming profiteers find their way onto the Pentagon gravy train? The answer is one more example of this administration’s disastrous mismanagement of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. 6.29.08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/29/opinion/29sun2.html
8. Michael Clark: Pentagon: Taliban resurgent while we're tied down in Iraq
On Friday the Defense Department released two reports to Congress about Afghanistan (as required by law). One is the first biennial report on security in the country, the other a plan for sustaining the Afghan National Security Forces (both PDFs). The news is grim. But just as with the Iraq quarterly reports, the DoD tries to put a positive spin on things. This time the best evidence of that is on display in purple font (literally).
The security report indicates that the situation is deteriorating so badly that the Pentagon expects the Taliban to continue to grow in strength (it has "coalesced into a resilient insurgency"); expand its strongholds in the south and east while moving into the north and west; and "maintain or even increase the scope and pace of its terrorist attacks and bombings in 2008" (IED attacks were up 35% in 2007). June has seen 40 coalition soldiers killed in Afghanistan, a new high since the invasion. Even though we have only 32,000 troops deployed there, US deaths in Afghanistan in May outnumbered those in Iraq. It's fair to say that things are falling apart. 6.28.08 http://smintheus.dailykos.com/
9. Neal Gabler: Cannibal liberals - Why do left-leaning journalists eat their own?
Oh, those crazy journalists. You know the ones I'm talking about. The one who described John Kerry as "French-looking" and made up some silly locution to show how out of touch he was -- "Who among us doesn't like NASCAR?" -- even though he never said it. Or the one who taunted Al Gore for claiming that he and his wife, Tipper, were the models for "Love Story" when Gore said no such thing. Or the one who described Bill Clinton as an "overweight band boy" and Hillary Rodham Clinton as "inauthentic." Or the one who tabbed Barack Obama "Obambi" and said that when visiting him at his office, she felt like Ingrid Bergman in "The Bells of St. Mary's," having to teach a bullied schoolboy how to box. Or the one who kept pressing Obama at a debate to fess up to his relationship with a 1960s terrorist.
Of course, what do you expect from right-wing nuts who will do and say anything to demonize Democrats? Except for one thing. All these examples -- and there are hundreds more -- were uttered not by Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O'Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, David Brooks or any of the other Republican mouthpieces in our newspapers and on our airwaves. They were all said or written by liberal journalists, and even in a few cases by onetime Democratic operatives turned journalists, such as Chris Matthews and George Stephanopoulos. Indeed, the worst offender by far, the "Ingrid Bergman" in the example above, has been the New York Times' liberal columnist Maureen Dowd, who has never met a Democrat she hasn't disparaged. 6.29.08 http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-gabler29-2008jun29,0,5652377.story
10. Robert Parry: Pretending That Bush is Not a Tyrant
If you listen to Bush's legal advisors, questions about the limits of his authority might not be hypothetical anymore.
All over the world down through history, political leaders who have engaged in torture and other grotesque crimes of state have justified their actions as necessary to protect their governments or their people or themselves.
It was true when England’s King Edward I had William Wallace – “Braveheart” – drawn and quartered in 1305 for resisting the crown’s rule in Scotland, and a gruesome death was what King George III foresaw for America’s Founding Fathers in 1776 when they stood up to his abuses in the Colonies.
Kings and tyrants often inflicted special pain on people they viewed as challenging their authority and – at such times – they wiped away the rules of justice. But the United States was supposed to be different.
Indeed, reaction to tyrannical monarchs was what compelled the Founders to establish a government of laws, not men, based on “unalienable rights” for all mankind, including protection against arbitrary detention and prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Which is why it was stunning to watch the June 26 hearing before the House Judiciary subcommittee on the Constitution as two representatives of George W. Bush’s presidency responded with disdain when pressed on the administration’s extraordinary vision of an all-powerful Executive operating without legal limits.
While Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington treated the committee Democrats with haughty contempt, former State Department lawyer John Yoo expressed the ultimate arrogance of power with his muddled responses and evasions of direct questions. 6.30.08 http://www.alternet.org/rights/89834/?ses=4c7067a99ab0c08709bf9922ecc62d61
11. Jason Miller: The Toddler King’s Insufferable Reign is Doomed
Both George Bush and Dick Cheney have emphatically proclaimed the American Way of Life as “non-negotiable.” As hard as it may be for the feeble-minded, deluded, conscienceless, or hopelessly addicted to grasp, Mother Nature and billions of human beings are going to force us to the bargaining table. We can kick, scream, stomp our feet, and hold our breath all we want, but our abhorrent mode of existence is going down.
Aside from the fact that they are utterly unsustainable, why is it such a certainty that American Capitalism, consumerism, militarism, and the myriad associated ills that exist to maintain our obscene lifestyle are a house of cards on the verge of collapse?
Quite simple really. With our overwhelming wealth, power, and military firepower, the United States exercises virtual hegemony over the globe. Granted our influence is waning, but we still call most of the shots. As lord and master of the planet, we are doing a miserable job. Emotionally infantile, we have a sense of entitlement that dwarfs Mt. Everest, we are absolutely certain that we are center of the universe, and we throw incredibly destructive tantrums when we don’t get our way, the American Way that is. We are massive toddlers inflicting our version of the “terrible twos” on the world. Were we not wielding such a massive cudgel, our childishness would be laughable.
Under our “good stewardship,” as our current unitary executive loves to call it, the world is careening down the highway at break-neck speed with an infant at the wheel. And if he crashes before an adult can wrest control from him, we’re looking at a major accident with multiple fatalities. We’ve already pushed the world to the verge of economic collapse, the brink of starvation, the initiation of perpetual war, and impending environmental disaster. 6/30/08 http://www.bestcyrano.org/THOMASPAINE/?p=772
12. BOB HERBERT: ‘Oh Happy Day’
It’s getting harder and harder to remain deluded. With each day comes new facts to drag our heads out of the sand.
Two weeks ago, The Times reported that four Western oil giants were on the verge of signing no-bid contracts that would return them to Iraq, the third-most bountiful petroleum playground on the planet. The deals, expected to be finalized in the next 30 days, were the kind of news that big oil lives for.
Giddy executives singing “Oh Happy Day” could be heard in the corporate offices of Exxon Mobil, Shell, Total and BP, which had been shut out of Iraq for three and a half decades.
We also learned this week that a group of American advisers, led by a team from the State Department, played a key role in drawing up the contracts between the companies and the Iraqi government. Chevron and several smaller oil companies are also on the verge of signing contracts.
President Bush and Vice President Cheney, both former oil-company executives, have long tried to tell us this war was about terrorism, about weapons of mass destruction, about bringing freedom and democracy to the Iraqi people, about anything but oil.
Said Mr. Bush: “We cannot wait for the final proof, the smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”
He didn’t wait. It didn’t matter that Saddam Hussein posed no imminent threat to the U.S. Or that Iraq had nothing to do with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The troops were sent into battle in early 2003 and there is still, after more than five years and more than 4,000 American deaths, no end to the war in sight.
Who knows how long it will be before the U.S. disengages in any significant way from Iraq. What you can take to the bank is that this country will not make any major advances in energy policy, in health coverage, in rebuilding its infrastructure, in improving its public schools or in curtailing runaway public and private debt until our open-ended commitment to this catastrophic multitrillion-dollar war comes to an end.
How long will it take before that finally sinks in? 7/01/08 http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/01/opinion/01herbert.html
13. Ari Berman: McCain the Reformer? You've Got to Be Joking
In early April John McCain held a top-dollar fundraiser at Washington's Willard Hotel, where President Ulysses S. Grant invented the term "lobbyist." It was a fitting locale, as the election-reform group Public Campaign noted, since thirty-five of the forty-three hosts for the evening were registered lobbyists. The following week Rick Davis -- on leave from his job as a lobbyist to work as McCain's campaign manager -- gave a strategy presentation to lobbyists from the oil, utility and nuclear power industries, soliciting campaign contributions.
McCain's ties to K Street began attracting attention, and a month later two of his key operatives were forced to resign after the press revealed that they'd lobbied for the Burmese dictatorship. A top McCain fundraiser, former Congressman Tom Loeffler, also got his walking papers after lobbying McCain on behalf of Saudi Arabia. In the space of ten days, five McCain lobbyists-turned-staffers left his campaign. Those who remained included senior adviser Charlie Black -- formerly one of the most high-profile Republican lobbyists in Washington, who has represented the likes of Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, mercenary contractor Blackwater and Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos. One could be forgiven for wondering, Was anyone in McCain's inner circle not a lobbyist? 7.01.08 http://www.alternet.org/election08/90006/
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