The American Apology T-shirt

John Dean on Gonzoles' death penalty briefs to aWol

Daily Kos: First Amendment means nothing to Bush

Emma finds things are even worse than she thought:

It's Not Only Water
I've blogged a couple of times about the shenanigans multinational water companies got up to when buying up public utilities in Latin America and other parts of the world.

Now it seems that water may be only the tip of the iceberg.

Two articles published in the paper version of Financial Times May 21st uncover the collusion between AES, a US-based energy group, and Enron to rig the auction of the Brazilian electricity company, Eletropaulo Metropolitana. The privatization of the largest electricity distribution company in Latin America was expected to bring several hundred million dollars above the minimum price of $1.78 billion.

Ah, but we already knew they were after power; to me, the water thing is worse. [Bloggered link]

MoveOn.org: Stop the FCC

"Congress and the FCC should stop media deregulation and work to make the media diverse, competitive, balanced, and fair."

TalkLeft: Wrongfully Convicted in Florida? Here's a Hundred Bucks

Black people make racists stupid!

South Knox Bubba: Babes of the Democratic Party

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | The British suicide bombers. So, yestereday's suicide bombers had British passports. That's a new wrinkle.

They Knew

Newsweek: The Secrets of September 11

Even as White House political aides plot a 2004 campaign plan designed to capitalize on the emotions and issues raised by the September 11 terror attacks, administration officials are waging a behind-the-scenes battle to restrict public disclosure of key events relating to the attacks.

AT THE CENTER of the dispute is a more-than-800-page secret report prepared by a joint congressional inquiry detailing the intelligence and law-enforcement failures that preceded the attacks—including provocative, if unheeded warnings, given President Bush and his top advisers during the summer of 2001.
[...]
The substance of that intelligence report was first disclosed at a public hearing last September by staff director Hill. But at the last minute, Hill was blocked from saying precisely who within the Bush White House got the briefing when CIA director Tenet classified the names of the recipients. (One source says the recipients of the briefing included Bush himself.) As a result, Hill was only able to say the briefing was given to “senior government officials.”

Bush knew, but refused to allow the FBI and CIA to investigate Al Qaeda.

That issue is now being refought in the context over the full report. The report names names, gives dates and provides a body of new information about the handling of many other crucial intelligence briefings—including one in early August 2001 given to national-security adviser Rice that discussed Al Qaeda operations within the United States and the possibility that the group’s members might seek to hijack airplanes. The administration “working group” is still refusing to declassify information about the briefings, sources said, and has even expressed regret that some of the material was ever provided to congressional investigators in the first place.

That would be the same Rice who said no one could have imagined planes would be hijacked.

So, they had the whole roadmap laid out for them and either were too thick to figure out how to get from A to B or too negligent to do anything about it. Now they're trying to cover it up, but the American people deserve to know, in detail, how this so-called president and his supposedly smart, experienced crew left America wide-open to enemy attack.

Daily Show: Debate between George W. Bush and George W. Bush (Real video).

Charlie is the second person I've noticed in the last 24 hours remarking on the parallels between what's going on in Iraq and Bloody Sunday. You'll excuse me if I'm not elated yet by our glorious victory.

I've mentioned Leon Holmes before, but just in case you've forgotten what a fruitcake Bush has nominated to the court, check out Ruminate This for more.

Aunt Lowey's Handy-Dandy Blog has good news for tea-drinkers.

Tim Dunlop responded to the news last week with the delightful headline, Administration officals confirm that Chomsky was correct:

We were told pretty regularly in the run up to war that arguing with the President, questioning the motives of the Administration, speaking out against the war, or arguing in favour of other, non-war, approaches was unpatriotic.

What word do we now use to describe the fact that the reasons given publicly for invading Iraq were false? Gee, I don't know, what do we call it when the Administration lies to the people in order to stage a war...how about impeachable?
[...]
So what Chomsky had gleaned from largely unheralded sources is now being confirmed by Administration officials via a major media outlet. Which is not to say that I agree with every inference Chomsky makes. And it is interesting to note that concern at such actions has come from rather more mainstream sources: the ABC article quotes, for instance, former CIA director, James Woolsey saying, "I don't think you should go to war to set examples or send messages."

Read the whole thing.

In The Guardian, Polly Toynebee senses a threat:

The threat to our TV from this corrupter of politicians

Now is the time for the Lords to earn its ermine. There are few occasions when its lack of democratic legitimacy is an advantage - but the communications bill is one. Over the next weeks, the Lords can exercise its duty to protect the citizens against the shabbier venalities of democracy. (Though that may not be what Tony Blair meant when he chose to leave them 100% unelected).

With both Labour and Conservative leaders in humiliating thrall to the menacing might of Rupert Murdoch, this is the legitimate time for the unelected Lords to rebel against the elected Commons and stop Murdoch seizing yet another slab of the British media.

Yesterday saw the opening skirmishes over the communications bill: the Lords will vote on it in a few weeks. This vast and baggy bill, packed with important but uncontentious technicalities, contains two momentous threats to the future quality of broadcasting. The key clauses have one sole function - to remove all obstacles to Murdoch seizing Channel 5, overshadowing ITV and, within a short time, providing the main competition to the BBC. The bill abolishes the requirement for owners of TV companies to be British or EU citizens. (Murdoch took US nationality to take over Fox TV: the US bans foreign ownership.)

The other crucial clause removes existing laws that prohibit anyone who owns 20% or more of newspaper readership from buying into TV. Murdoch already owns over 40% of Britain's newspaper readership, as well as his mighty Sky satellite empire.

There are a lot of things about America that Britons wish they had, but wall-to-wall Murdoch is not one of them. Personally, I kinda like Channel 5 the way it is.

The lovely Charles Pierce sat in for Alterman again, and this time he is looking at Sid Blumenthal.

The Daily Howler was pretty disgusted with Diane Sawyer's interview with the Dixie Chicks in which she kept hectoring them to take it all back, and also links to this article in Slate, in which Jim Lewis says:

For what it's worth, I have profoundly mixed feelings about the war, and if I were to sit down with Natalie Maines, I'm sure we'd have much to disagree about. But, just so you know, I'm proud that the Dixie Chicks are from Texas. What's more, I'm embarrassed that Diane Sawyer is a member of my profession.

I'm grateful that the Dixie Chicks were over here reminding the British that not all Americans are idiots.

Troops out of Saudi Arabia
America has begun a historic reshaping of its presence in the Middle East, announcing a halt to active military operations in Saudi Arabia and the removal of most of its forces within weeks.

I figure to make it exactly four weeks: Tomorrow around noon I'm going to stand up straight, do some neck exercises, and spend about an hour and a half in the shower washing my hair. That's right, I haven't been able to wash my hair for four weeks. I have it twisted up so I don't have to cope with it, but it's such a sin to treat beautiful hair this way, I can't stand it. Looking in the mirror is a trauma (made even worse by the fact that gravity is at its most unkind, cosmetically speaking, when you are facing the floor). I still can't see much through the bubble, which still won't dissipate for another couple weeks or so, but it will be such a relief to have my hair sweeping across my back again. Well, of course, it will be an even bigger relief to be able to lift my head up.

And then I will put the screen back on top of my PC and go back to posting at The Sideshow.

Last night I made the mistake of reading Talk Left without making sure I had some Fats Waller in the drive first. It all sent me to bed with bad dreams. Like this post predicting Senate confirmation of right-wing fruitcake Jeffrey Sutton. And yeah, they did it. Why? If they can filibuster Owens, why not Sutton as well? I can't help the feeling that these guys still think it's just a game - they can refuse to confirm Estrada and Owens because of some procedural excuses about how they didn't play the game correctly, but when they get someone who is open about how unsuitable for the job he is, they just go, "Oh, okay." Sure, they voted against him, but they knew damn well that wasn't gonna be enough.

Then there is the article on revoking attorney-client privilege. Actually, it's worse than that - it's revoking the right of unpopular people to have legal representation:

Lynne Stewart, a New York human-rights lawyer with a taste for radical politics, is accustomed to representing unpopular clients.
She never dreamed it would become illegal.

Stewart was in Seattle on Monday as part of a national campaign to drum up support—not for a client, but for her own case. Stewart was a member of the court-appointed defense team for Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, who is serving a life sentence in connection with the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. After his conviction, Stewart continued as one of the lawyers representing Abdel Rahman. The Seattle visit came just over a year after her arrest April 8, 2002, when she was taken from her home without warning. Federal agents combed through her office, seizing files on all of her cases, and Attorney General John Ashcroft proudly announced that Stewart had been charged in a four-count criminal indictment with aiding and abetting a terrorist organization—solely for her work in representing Abdel Rahman.

Stewart's case, now winding its way through pretrial motions toward a January trial, stands as a critical test for the Bush administration's newly reserved right to violate lawyer-client confidentiality in order to wage the war on terror. It also has a significant First Amendment component. Stewart's indictment charges her with discussing Abdel Rahman's case with a Reuters reporter—even though no gag order barred her from doing so; with talking while an interpreter was speaking with her client during a consultation in his prison cell, thereby preventing the Justice Department from taping their conversation in Arabic; and with allowing the interpreter and client to speak in Arabic about nonlegal matters. If convicted, she faces 40 years in prison.

THE CHARGES STRIKE at the heart of the U.S. Constitution's Sixth Amendment guarantee that all people accused of a crime are entitled to effective representation by an attorney. Courts have long held that attorney-client confidentiality is essential to that right; without the ability to speak freely about what they have, and have not, done, defendants are severely impaired from learning their legal status and options, and attorneys cannot mount the best defense. But Stewart's case has broader implications. In the future, attorneys will be less willing to represent clients like Abdel Rahman.

And since Stewart's indictment, Ashcroft has gone even further, declaring noncitizens, and later, U.S. citizens as well, "enemy noncombatants" so as to hold them indefinitely without charges, denying access to any attorney at all.

There's yet another item to add to my I Wasn't Paranoid Enough file. Oh, and this doesn't look much like America, either.

There's a post over at Pandagon that kinda makes me inarticulate with fury:

Saddam Paid Better

This story from the London Times is telling. Our goal in Iraq is nation-building, but the people of Iraq will not simply accept "slightly better than Saddam" as an end target. Or, in this case, slightly worse than Saddam.

The wages of skilled workers were to be cut to $22 (£13.80) a month, those of the unskilled to $10. Graduates and trained professionals, who had been working as translators and drivers for about £1.30 a day, found themselves being paid 50p or less. The effect was immediate: less than three weeks after liberating Iraq’s second-largest city, the British forces had a strike on their hands.

The pay was being cut to conform with standards imposed across Iraq by the United States. “This is cruelty,” Vahan Gregor, a civil engineer who used to have his own company, said. “The rate is not even enough to pay for the lift into work. A packet of decent cigarettes costs more than a day’s pay. A packet of nappies is one month! Is this fair? Even under Saddam, it was better than this.”

The more we get into the "freedom" part of Operation: Iraqi Freedom, the less confidence I have that we can deliver on that promise.

“I am so disappointed with the British,” Ahmed Ali, a former geography teacher who has been working for the UK force, said. “If you make an agreement, you should keep to it — not reduce pay after one week. Mr Bush talked so much about freedom and how we would live in great conditions after the war. Well, that was all bullshit.”

That's a freakin' fantastic sentiment.

I could rant for pages if I only knew where to start.

Richard Cohen joins William Raspberry on the "Gee, did I get fooled?" wagon.

American Stranger has now set up a temporary site while working on a redesign of blah3.

The weekly Sunday talk-show breakdown at Liberal Oasis is heartening. First there's Lincoln Chafee saying this on Face the Nation:

…I'm trying to figure out why these conservatives are pushing the bigger and bigger tax cuts when traditionally conservatives have been opposed to deficits.

And all I can figure is that if we get these big deficits, then the pressure will be on to strangle…what is called the “wasteful social spending.”

Whether it's Section 8 [housing for the poor] or Medicare or Medicaid or Social Security [or] Head Start programs or Pell grants.

And I think that's the tactic. Once we get these deficits, then we can attack these so-called wasteful social spending programs…

[But] I think these social programs have made a lot of people's lives a great deal better.

(Why is that guy a Republican?)

Then there's Senator Bob Graham on This Week doing exactly what Democrats should have been doing all along:

We have virtually abandoned the war on terrorism.

We have withdrawn military intelligence capabilities from Afghanistan, and because of that, Al Qaeda has been able to regroup……we have not taken on the A-Team of [terrorism] -- Hezbollah, [Hamas and Islamic Jihad] -- in Syria and Lebanon…

…we have allowed our alliances, which are going to be absolutely critical to winning the war on terrorism, to disintegrate.

I don't think that’s a very impressive national security record.

That's what we need to hear!

A letter at Altercation:

Name: Marie Foster
Hometown: Spokane, WA
I keep holding up my hand to try to get anyone’s attention to the recent rules signed by Bush reversing the way that the BLM evaluates our public lands. This was an executive decision that says now that the BLM CAN NOT consider any set asides of public lands for recreation or wildlife preservation or conservation. If any piece of land has commercial value that is what is going to determine how our lands are managed.

Recreation et al is no longer an equal value to extractive ones (mining, logging, grazing etc.)

This is a further move towards privatization of EVERYTHING which is the neoconservative agenda as promoted by people like the CATO institute.

Please! I implore you to use the popularity of your site to publicize this.

There are dozens of things like this going on that most of us simply don't have time to talk about, because there are just so damn many of them.

I learn many things from Charles Kuffner, who refers to a post by Mark Evanier at his cool, new, Movable-Typed site, where he commented on the Tim Robbins/Today issue. Mark is willing to give Today the benefit of the doubt (and I'm not), but he does say:

I just think it's funny that, intentional or not, Robbins got cut off while he was going after Corporate America on NBC, just like a Saturday Night Live sketch in which Tim Robbins got cut off while he was going after Corporate America on NBC.

Diane at Karmalised wants to know how John McCain can have forgotten about North Korea before but now suddenly remembers it and wants to know why no one else has paid attention to it.

All this spin about celebrities having opinions on politics when they are "only" actors and presumably have no more expertise than anyone else has a lot of drawbacks, to be sure - the most obvious one being that, as American citizens, they have every right to say what they think, just like all the other talking heads do. But what really gets me is the idea that all the other talking heads are somehow more qualified. The people who are criticizing Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins are, of course, people who have done no more research into the issues than Sarandon and Robbins have done - in fact, they appear to have done considerably less. Who are O'Reilly or Hannity or Limbaugh to express any opinions on politics? Do they actually know anything? Do they read the Congressional Record every day, comb through legislation, check out the historical background of trends, study peer-reviewed research? Of course they don't - these guys aren't I.F. Stone, y'know.

Let's face it, it's infuriating to watch over and over as the op-ed columnists and political talk-show hosts who have become celebrities (and pull down nice salaries) for supposedly telling us what we don't know actually know far less than we do, and have done far less work to find out, too. They get paid to spout their uninformed opinions - the rest of us have to spend precious time digging out that information for ourselves and do it out of our own pockets as well. First you pay for a television, a radio, newspaper subscriptions and what have you in order to learn this stuff, and then you still have to go out and do research to find out what's really going on.

George F. Will's son once dragged him to a Springsteen concert. (As I recall, this was during the Born in the USA tour.) He couldn't avoid being impressed by the energy of Springsteen on stage. So without doing a lick of research, without even checking out Springsteen's lyrics, he wrote a whole column about how Bruce was the voice of Reagan's America. It apparently hadn't crossed his mind that Springsteen might have had other views - he couldn't even bother to look. Of course, Will was wrong.

I'm invited to appear on talk shows from time to time, not because of my expertise so much as because I come from a group with the colorful name of "Feminists Against Censorship". Because the people involved in the production of these shows don't actually know much, they still think that's a counter-intuitive idea. What's really annoying is that I'm often put up against some "expert" who has a degree in psychology who is there to say what the research on pornography "really" says. The problem is that of the two of us, I'm the only one who has read the research. The interviewers will talk to me about my personal opinions - they regularly ask me whether I like pornography, as if that mattered when the issue is censorship - but they will ask the professional shrink what the "facts" are. The professional shrink will then regurgitate something they probably read in a newspaper article written by someone who had only talked to anti-pornography activists. It's a rare occasion when I manage to get back in long enough to say something to make clear to the audience that the "expert" doesn't know what he's talking about. So to the presenters and production staff on these shows, someone who has no real knowledge of the subject is the "expert", but the fact that I've actually read the research myself doesn't matter.

Strangely, to the readers of newspapers, the idea that reporters and regular op-ed columnists have real knowledge of what they are writing about - that they have done more to find these things out than someone who isn't paid to do so - really does matter. No one needs to watch the news or buy a paper just to hear gossip from the ignorant, since they can get that down the pub any day of the week. Besides, if we're the ones who are going to do the work of finding that stuff out, how come we're not the ones who are getting paid for it? It's enough to really piss you off.

This is, of course, Bob Somerby's beat, and he's on the case over that Raspberry article I cited earlier - the one where Raspberry admits he was snowed by Colin Powell, and says:

Here, the secretary of state was telling the jury masquerading as the U.N. Security Council, you see the chemical and biological labs at one of the production sites. And here, you notice, the trucks are gone—just hours before the U.N. inspectors are due on the scene. Here are the time-lapse photographs, taken by satellite and spy planes…I believed it—and for much the same reasons I believed the prosecution’s DNA evidence against O.J. Simpson. That is to say, I didn't understand most of it, but I was terribly impressed by the certitude of those who said they did.

If he didn't understand it, what qualified him to be paid to write about whether or not he was convinced by it? Somerby quite rightly says:

That last past is certainly true, by the way; Raspberry did have lots of company. Many Americans were convinced by Powell’s U.N. presentation. But Raspberry is an important columnist at our most important political newspaper. As such, he’s supposed to have better skills, better contacts, and more experience than “hundreds of thousands of Americans.” In fact, those Americans rely on Raspberry’s diligence and expertise—rely on him and others like him to perform the analyses they can't conduct. But even now, if you read his column, the pundit still doesn't mention the specific problems with Powell’s presentations at the U.N.—problems which were publicly examined in February and March. Even now, he doesn't seem up to speed on the debate about what Powell did.

As we've said, we at THE HOWLER have always assumed that Saddam had WMDs. Raspberry now seems to have some doubts—and he seems to have major doubts about Powell. (“Powell’s spellbinding display looks more and more like prosecutorial hokum.”) But it’s hard to believe that this is the way our major analysts actually reason. But as noted: Americans pay a price, every day, for the work of this puzzling crew.

And that price includes a "president" who "won" without getting the requisite votes, who lied during the campaign with impunity and has been doing so ever since, right up to lying us into a diplomatic disaster and a war that has very likely hurt American interests for decades to come, not to mention a stunning loss of our Constitutional rights and our economic security as well. (Thanks to these people, the loss of those museums, libraries, and even lives are not to be treated as having any importance.) Most Americans, who simply don't have the time to research the facts behind "the news", have no idea what's been done to them. It's a pity Tim Robbins and Susan Sarandon didn't have regular columns in The Washington Post, or a drive-time radio show, and a seat on Meet the Press, so someone could have told them.