More Crap the Republicans are Pulling, in Case You Missed it

It's hardly news at this point that, as it works today, the Electoral College undermines American democracy. It does so in three fundamental ways: First, it betrays the principle of majority rule, threatening every four years to deliver the White House to the popular-vote loser. Second, it reduces the general election contest to a matter of what happens in Ohio, Florida, and a handful of other swing states, leaving most Americans (who live in forsaken "red" and "blue" states) on the sidelines. This in turn depresses turnout and helps give us one of the worst rates of voter participation on earth. Third, because of its proven pliability, the Electoral College invites partisan operatives, legislators, secretaries of state and even Supreme Court justices to engage in constant strategic mischief and manipulation at the state level.

This last problem is about to make things much worse, as strategic actors try to exploit spreading discontent with the system by pushing "reform" proposals for purely partisan advantage. Thus, in California, top Republican strategists are now proposing a ballot initiative that would "reform" the system by awarding the state's electoral votes by congressional district. Its real purpose is to break up the state's 55 electors, which typically go to the Democrats in a bloc as inevitably as Texas, Georgia, and Oklahoma give their 56 combined electors to the Republicans. Following the proposed division of California's well-gerrymandered blue and red congressional districts, it is likely that the 2008 GOP nominee under this plan would carry away about 20 electors. In one fell swoop, this would ruin the Democrats' chances for winning the presidency.

Link.

Yes, A Larry Craig Joke, More or Less

Never thought about this but one does, it's kind of incredible:

If that's true — if he wasn't soliciting gay sex when they caught him — then pleading guilty is one of the great all-fired braindead moves of all time. Even without advice of counsel, you oughta know that. Someone that stupid should not be making our laws.

On the other hand, if it's not true — if he was trolling for men's room sex and he said the above to try and save his image, he oughta be kicked out of public service for sheer idiocy. That's even stupider than pleading guilty to a sex crime you didn't commit because you think it'll end your problems quicker. And what's even stupider is thinking that anyone anywhere will believe it.

Link.

So lemme see.... This wingnut has enough hubris to believe that the story would never, well, come out. And then not to comprehend what would happen when it would come out that a modern conservative was a closeted homosexual (well, maybe he had to be bi to get any).

Of course, even if he thought, retained an attorney, bit the bullet and fought the charges, he's probably still be where is, copping a plea. It would have been a really hard rap to beat: cop doing his job with nothing at stake against a lying sack of shit pol (yes, I just convicted Craig all be myself. Wow, his presumption of innocence didn't last long here! Any shorter and you'd think I was a modern conservative, ready and willing to convict anyone in my mind with minimal proof or less!)

Another Rightwing Lynching

Last Feb. 12, you may recall, New York education officials announced plans to open a minischool in September that would teach half its classes in Arabic and include study of Arab culture. The principal was to be a veteran teacher who was also a Muslim immigrant from Yemen, Debbie Almontaser.

The critical response began pouring in the very next day.

“I hope it burns to the ground just like the towers did with all the students inside including school officials as well,” wrote an unidentified blogger on the Web site Modern Tribalist, a hub of anti-immigrant sentiment. A contributor identified as Dave responded, “Now Muslims will be able to learn how to become terrorists without leaving New York City.”

Not to be outdone, the conservative Web site Political Dishonesty carried this commentary on Feb. 14:

“Just think, instead of jocks, cheerleaders and nerds, there’s going to be the Taliban hanging out on the history hall, Al Qaeda hanging out by the gym, and Palestinians hanging out in the science labs. Hamas and Hezbollah studies will be the prerequisite classes for an Iranian physics. Maybe in gym they’ll learn how to wire their bomb vests and they’ll convert the football field to a terrorist training camp.”

Thus commenced the smear campaign against the Khalil Gibran International Academy and, specifically, Debbie Almontaser. For the next six months, from blogs to talk shows to cable networks to the right-wing press, the hysteria and hatred never ceased. Regrettably, it worked.

Ms. Almontaser resigned as principal earlier this month. Nominally, she quit to quell the controversy about her remarks to The New York Post insufficiently denouncing the term “intifada” on a T-shirt made by a local Arab-American organization. That episode, however, merely provided the pretext for her ouster, for the triumph of a concerted exercise in character assassination.

After initially consenting to an interview for this column, Ms. Almontaser backed out, saying she did not want to “do anything that would jeopardize the school,” which is still set to open next month in the Boerum Hill section of Brooklyn. One of her longtime colleagues, however, spoke candidly about her emotions.

“She feels that she’s been violated, personally and professionally,” said Louis Cristillo, a research professor at Teachers College at Columbia University who has studied the experiences of Muslim children in the New York public schools. “To be painted as somebody who’s un-American, questioning her patriotism, is extremely hurtful for her. She’s really shocked at how devastatingly effective the defamation was.”

For anyone who bothered to look for it, Ms. Almontaser left a clear, public record of interfaith activism and outreach across the boundaries of race, ethnicity and religion. Her efforts, especially after the Sept. 11 attacks, earned her honors, grants and fellowships. She has collaborated so often with Jewish organizations that an Arab-American newspaper, Aramica, castigated her earlier this summer for being too close to a “Zionist organization,” meaning the Anti-Defamation League.

Ms. Almontaser has twice been profiled on Voice of America as an accomplished Muslim American. Her son, Yousif, spent several months on rescue efforts at ground zero as a member of the Army National Guard. Four of her nephews and cousins have served in the United States military in Iraq.

None of these details were exactly hidden under a rock. But her critics ignored them. In syndicated columns by Daniel Pipes, in articles and editorials in The New York Post and The New York Sun, on such Web sites as PipeLineNews and Militant Islam Monitor, both concerned with radical Islam, the Gibran school was repeatedly characterized as a “madrassa,” an Arabic term plainly meant to evoke images of indoctrination into terrorism and holy war.

Bella Rabinowitz, writing on March 9 in PipeLineNews, called Gibran “an Islamist public school whose curriculum shares the same ideology as the Sept. 11 terrorists.” Alicia Colon wrote in The Sun on May 1, “How delighted Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda must have been to hear the news” that New York “is bowing down in homage to accommodate and perhaps groom future radicals.”

Just as the school was caricatured, so was Ms. Almontaser. Although she has used the first name Debbie since childhood, her critics relentlessly identified her by her legal name Dhabah, the better to render her alien. Some articles would add the phrase “a k a Debbie,” treating her chosen name as a sort of criminal alias.

What all the attacks lacked was a single solid example of Ms. Almontaser having espoused Islamic extremism, much less jihad, during her 15 years as an educator. They have described her as a “9/11 denier” on the basis of one statement that “I don’t recognize the people who committed the attacks as either Arabs or Muslims.”

Yet, as Larry Cohler-Esses noted in an incisive article in New York Jewish Week, these foes conveniently overlooked what Ms. Almontaser went on to say in the same interview: “Those people who did it have stolen my identity as an Arab and stolen my religion.”

What Ms. Almontaser has done — as a private citizen, not in her classroom — is assail the Bush administration for its domestic surveillance and for its Middle East policies. She has said that desperation and oppression contribute to terrorism. You can disagree with her positions and still not believe they should be the basis for destroying her career.

“There’s zero correspondence between the caricature and the actual person,” said Rabbi Andy Bachman of Beth Elohim, a Reform Jewish congregation in Park Slope, who was on the Gibran school’s advisory board. “The words that were used to describe her, the fears that were evoked, are absolutely unrelated to her and her life’s work. Not in any way, shape or form.”

Another rabbi who has worked with Ms. Almontaser on interfaith efforts, Michael Feinberg of the Greater New York Labor-Religion Coalition, said: “It’s all about insinuation and innuendo and this formula of Arab equals Muslim equals terrorist. The viciousness and the vileness of this case surpass anything I’ve seen before.”

That vileness also did no favors to the responsible critics of the Gibran school, whether they were parents worried about school overcrowding or scholars like Diane Ravitch and Richard Kahlenberg, who believe that public schools should reinforce a common American culture rather than promote ethnic identity. Their worthy voices got lost in all the bile.

For now at least, Ms. Almontaser remains employed by the Department of Education. What she requires, though, is something harder to obtain than another job. As another victim of a different smear campaign put it once: “Which office do I go to to get my reputation back?”

Link.

What Happens When One Creates a ne Party State and the People Hate that One Party?

An endless stream of crises and scandals....

Shh; Don't Say a Word; Freedom on the March in Our Leaders' Freedom-Loving America

The FBI has quietly built a sophisticated, point-and-click surveillance system that performs instant wiretaps on almost any communications device, according to nearly a thousand pages of restricted documents newly released under the Freedom of Information Act.
The surveillance system, called DCSNet, for Digital Collection System Network, connects FBI wiretapping rooms to switches controlled by traditional land-line operators, internet-telephony providers and cellular companies. It is far more intricately woven into the nation's telecom infrastructure than observers suspected.
It's a "comprehensive wiretap system that intercepts wire-line phones, cellular phones, SMS and push-to-talk systems," says Steven Bellovin, a Columbia University computer science professor and longtime surveillance expert.

DCSNet is a suite of software that collects, sifts and stores phone numbers, phone calls and text messages. The system directly connects FBI wiretapping outposts around the country to a far-reaching private communications network.
Many of the details of the system and its full capabilities were redacted from the documents acquired by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, but they show that DCSNet includes at least three collection components, each running on Windows-based computers.
The $10 million DCS-3000 client, also known as Red Hook, handles pen-registers and trap-and-traces, a type of surveillance that collects signaling information -- primarily the numbers dialed from a telephone -- but no communications content. (Pen registers record outgoing calls; trap-and-traces record incoming calls.)
DCS-6000, known as Digital Storm, captures and collects the content of phone calls and text messages for full wiretap orders.
A third, classified system, called DCS-5000, is used for wiretaps targeting spies or terrorists.
What DCSNet Can Do
Together, the surveillance systems let FBI agents play back recordings even as they are being captured (like TiVo), create master wiretap files, send digital recordings to translators, track the rough location of targets in real time using cell-tower information, and even stream intercepts outward to mobile surveillance vans.
FBI wiretapping rooms in field offices and undercover locations around the country are connected through a private, encrypted backbone that is separated from the internet. Sprint runs it on the government's behalf.
The network allows an FBI agent in New York, for example, to remotely set up a wiretap on a cell phone based in Sacramento, California, and immediately learn the phone's location, then begin receiving conversations, text messages and voicemail pass codes in New York. With a few keystrokes, the agent can route the recordings to language specialists for translation.
The numbers dialed are automatically sent to FBI analysts trained to interpret phone-call patterns, and are transferred nightly, by external storage devices, to the bureau's Telephone Application Database, where they're subjected to a type of data mining called link analysis.
FBI endpoints on DCSNet have swelled over the years, from 20 "central monitoring plants" at the program's inception, to 57 in 2005, according to undated pages in the released documents. By 2002, those endpoints connected to more than 350 switches.
Today, most carriers maintain their own central hub, called a "mediation switch," that's networked to all the individual switches owned by that carrier, according to the FBI. The FBI's DCS software links to those mediation switches over the internet, likely using an encrypted VPN. Some carriers run the mediation switch themselves, while others pay companies like VeriSign to handle the whole wiretapping process for them.
The numerical scope of DCSNet surveillance is still guarded. But we do know that as telecoms have become more wiretap-friendly, the number of criminal wiretaps alone has climbed from 1,150 in 1996 to 1,839 in 2006. That's a 60 percent jump. And in 2005, 92 percent of those criminal wiretaps targeted cell phones, according to a report published last year.
These figures include both state and federal wiretaps, and do not include antiterrorism wiretaps, which dramatically expanded after 9/11. They also don't count the DCS-3000's collection of incoming and outgoing phone numbers dialed. Far more common than full-blown wiretaps, this level of surveillance requires only that investigators certify that the phone numbers are relevant to an investigation.
The Justice Department reports the number of pen registers to Congress annually, but those numbers aren't public. According to the last figures leaked to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, judges signed 4,886 pen register orders in 1998, along with 4,621 time extensions.
CALEA Switches Rules on Switches
The law that makes the FBI's surveillance network possible had its genesis in the Clinton administration. In the 1990s, the Justice Department began complaining to Congress that digital technology, cellular phones and features like call forwarding would make it difficult for investigators to continue to conduct wiretaps. Congress responded by passing the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, or CALEA, in 1994, mandating backdoors in U.S. telephone switches.
CALEA requires telecommunications companies to install only telephone-switching equipment that meets detailed wiretapping standards. Prior to CALEA, the FBI would get a court order for a wiretap and present it to a phone company, which would then create a physical tap of the phone system.
With new CALEA-compliant digital switches, the FBI now logs directly into the telecom's network. Once a court order has been sent to a carrier and the carrier turns on the wiretap, the communications data on a surveillance target streams into the FBI's computers in real time.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation requested documents on the system under the Freedom of Information Act, and successfully sued the Justice Department in October 2006.
In May, a federal judge ordered the FBI to provide relevant documents to the EFF every month until it has satisfied the FOIA request.
"So little has been known up until now about how DCS works," says EFF attorney Marcia Hofmann. "This is why it's so important for FOIA requesters to file lawsuits for information they really want."
Special Agent Anthony DiClemente, chief of the Data Acquisition and Intercept Section of the FBI's Operational Technology Division, said the DCS was originally intended in 1997 to be a temporary solution, but has grown into a full-featured CALEA-collection software suite.
"CALEA revolutionizes how law enforcement gets intercept information," DiClemente told Wired News. "Before CALEA, it was a rudimentary system that mimicked Ma Bell."
Privacy groups and security experts have protested CALEA design mandates from the start, but that didn't stop federal regulators from recently expanding the law's reach to force broadband internet service providers and some voice-over-internet companies, such as Vonage, to similarly retrofit their networks for government surveillance.
New Technologies
Meanwhile, the FBI's efforts to keep up with the current communications explosion is never-ending, according to DiClemente.
The released documents suggest that the FBI's wiretapping engineers are struggling with peer-to-peer telephony provider Skype, which offers no central location to wiretap, and with innovations like caller-ID spoofing and phone-number portability.
But DCSNet seems to have kept pace with at least some new technologies, such as cell-phone push-to-talk features and most VOIP internet telephony.
"It is fair to say we can do push-to-talk," DiClemente says. "All of the carriers are living up to their responsibilities under CALEA."
Matt Blaze, a security researcher at the University of Pennsylvania who helped assess the FBI's now-retired Carnivore internet-wiretapping application in 2000, was surprised to see that DCSNet seems equipped to handle such modern communications tools. The FBI has been complaining for years that it couldn't tap these services.
The redacted documentation left Blaze with many questions, however. In particular, he said it's unclear what role the carriers have in opening up a tap, and how that process is secured.
"The real question is the switch architecture on cell networks," said Blaze. "What's the carrier side look like?"
Randy Cadenhead, the privacy counsel for Cox Communications, which offers VOIP phone service and internet access, says the FBI has no independent access to his company's switches.
"Nothing ever gets connected or disconnected until I say so, based upon a court order in our hands," Cadenhead says. "We run the interception process off of my desk, and we track them coming in. We give instructions to relevant field people who allow for interconnection and to make verbal connections with technical representatives at the FBI."
The nation's largest cell-phone providers -- whose customers are targeted in the majority of wiretaps -- were less forthcoming. AT&T politely declined to comment, while Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon simply ignored requests for comment.
Agent DiClemente, however, seconded Cadenhead's description.
"The carriers have complete control. That's consistent with CALEA," DiClemente said. "The carriers have legal teams to read the order, and they have procedures in place to review the court orders, and they also verify the information and that the target is one of their subscribers."
Cost
Despite its ease of use, the new technology is proving more expensive than a traditional wiretap. Telecoms charge the government an average of $2,200 for a 30-day CALEA wiretap, while a traditional intercept costs only $250, according to the Justice Department inspector general. A federal wiretap order in 2006 cost taxpayers $67,000 on average, according to the most recent U.S. Court wiretap report.
What's more, under CALEA, the government had to pay to make pre-1995 phone switches wiretap-friendly. The FBI has spent almost $500 million on that effort, but many traditional wire-line switches still aren't compliant.
Processing all the phone calls sucked in by DCSNet is also costly. At the backend of the data collection, the conversations and phone numbers are transferred to the FBI's Electronic Surveillance Data Management System, an Oracle SQL database that's seen a 62 percent growth in wiretap volume over the last three years -- and more than 3,000 percent growth in digital files like e-mail. Through 2007, the FBI has spent $39 million on the system, which indexes and analyzes data for agents, translators and intelligence analysts.
Security Flaws
To security experts, though, the biggest concern over DCSNet isn't the cost: It's the possibility that push-button wiretapping opens new security holes in the telecommunications network.
More than 100 government officials in Greece learned in 2005 that their cell phones had been bugged, after an unknown hacker exploited CALEA-like functionality in wireless-carrier Vodafone's network. The infiltrator used the switches' wiretap-management software to send copies of officials' phone calls and text messages to other phones, while simultaneously hiding the taps from auditing software.
The FBI's DiClemente says DCSNet has never suffered a similar breach, so far as he knows.
"I know of no issue of compromise, internal or external," DiClemente says. He says the system's security is more than adequate, in part because the wiretaps still "require the assistance of a provider." The FBI also uses physical-security measures to control access to DCSNet end points, and has erected firewalls and other measures to render them "sufficiently isolated," according to DiClemente.
But the documents show that an internal 2003 audit uncovered numerous security vulnerabilities in DCSNet -- many of which mirror problems unearthed in the bureau's Carnivore application years earlier.
In particular, the DCS-3000 machines lacked adequate logging, had insufficient password management, were missing antivirus software, allowed unlimited numbers of incorrect passwords without locking the machine, and used shared logins rather than individual accounts.
The system also required that DCS-3000's user accounts have administrative privileges in Windows, which would allow a hacker who got into the machine to gain complete control.
Columbia's Bellovin says the flaws are appalling and show that the FBI fails to appreciate the risk from insiders.
"The underlying problem isn't so much the weaknesses here, as the FBI attitude towards security," he says. The FBI assumes "the threat is from the outside, not the inside," he adds, and it believes that "to the extent that inside threats exist, they can be controlled by process rather than technology."
Bellovin says any wiretap system faces a slew of risks, such as surveillance targets discovering a tap, or an outsider or corrupt insider setting up unauthorized taps. Moreover, the architectural changes to accommodate easy surveillance on phone switches and the internet can introduce new security and privacy holes.
"Any time something is tappable there is a risk," Bellovin says. "I'm not saying, 'Don't do wiretaps,' but when you start designing a system to be wiretappable, you start to create a new vulnerability. A wiretap is, by definition, a vulnerability from the point of the third party. The question is, can you control it?"

Link.

If No One Else Has Something Nice to Say about You, this SIte Will....

Link.

That Rightwing Exemplar

The background:

Is there a more misunderstood man in America than Sen. Larry Craig?

When the Idaho Republican was picked up for soliciting sex in a Minnesota men's room in June, he told police that they were "misconstruing" his actions. When he tapped the foot of a man in an adjoining stall, it was just because he has a "wide stance" when sitting on the toilet. When he reached repeatedly under the stall wall, he was just trying to "pick up a piece of paper" from the floor, even though the police officer who arrested him said there was no paper on the floor and Craig didn't pick any up.

Oh, and when Craig pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of disorderly conduct arising out of the arrest? That was a goof; Craig says he didn't have a lawyer, and he thought pleading guilty would be the best way to handle the matter "quickly and expeditiously."

If all this were even a little bit believable, it won't be after you read the extraordinary, 3,700-word account of Craig's homosexuality denials in this morning's Idaho Statesman. When online activist Mike Rogers published claims last year that Craig had engaged in sexual acts with a man at Washington's Union Station, the Statesman refrained from reporting the allegations because it wanted to make sure it had the story right -- a task made more difficult when Craig insisted repeatedly in a May 14, 2007, interview that all of the stories about him were wrong.

Among the highlights from that interview:

The Union Station men's room. When the Statesman played Craig and his wife a tape recording of the man who said he had sex with Craig at Union Station, the senator responded by saying: "I am not gay and I have never been in a restroom in Union Station having sex with anybody ... There's a very clear bottom line here. I don't do that kind of thing. I am not gay, and I never have been." Craig's wife teared up and said she was "incensed" that the paper would "even consider such as a piece of trash as a credible source." Craig chimed in, "Jiminy God!"

The fraternity room: When the Statesman asked Craig about the charge that he extended "an invitation to sex" to a man who was thinking about pledging his fraternity in 1967, Craig said: "I don't hit on any men."

The REI store: When the Statesman asked Craig about allegations that he "cruised" another man at the REI store in Boise in 1994, Craig said: "Once again, I'm not gay, and I don't cruise, and I don't hit on men." He said the man who accused him of cruising him might have misinterpreted a politician's smile. "Here is one thing I do out in public: I make eye contact, I smile at people, they recognize me, they say, 'Oh, hi, Senator.' Or, 'Do I know you?'" Craig continued: "I've been in this business 27 years in the public eye here. I don't go around anywhere hitting on men, and by God, if I did, I wouldn't do it in Boise, Idaho! Jiminy!"

As the Statesmen notes, Craig has voted to deny rights to gay men and women about as often as he has denied that he is gay himself. In 2004, he voted for a federal constitutional amendment that would have banned gay marriage, and the Statesmen says he has voted against allowing gay men and women to serve in the military and against extending civil rights to gay men and women in the workplace. Although he has said he supports the idea of civil unions, Craig issued a statement last fall -- right after Rogers first published allegations of the Union Station incident -- in which he said he supported an Idaho constitutional amendment outlawing such unions in the state.

It's too early to know how all this will play out for Craig's political career, but it can't be good. Idaho is one of the reddest states in the country -- in 2004, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney picked up 69 percent of the vote there -- which means a) voters probably won't cotton much to what they're learning this morning about Craig, but b) it will be tough for the Democrats to pick up the seat anyway.

What we do know already: Mitt Romney, who was counting on Craig's support in Idaho, is running away as fast as he can. As soon as Roll Call broke the news of Craig's arrest Monday, the Romney campaign pulled down a YouTube video featuring Craig and canceled a trip one of Romney's sons was to make to Boise this week. Craig then informed Romney's campaign that he'd be stepping down as co-chairman of the GOP presidential candidate's Idaho campaign. He said he didn't want to be a "distraction."

Update: Craig's claim that he pled guilty in error because he didn't have a lawyer advising him at the time? As Roll Call reports, police records show that Craig returned to the Minneapolis-St. Paul airport in late June -- 11 days after his arrest but nearly two months before he pled guilty -- and asked about a police contact so that "his lawyer can speak to someone."

Link. And the full background is here.

Why it matters:

As the Mark Foley sex scandal was breaking last year, Weekly Standard editor and Fox News pundit Bill Kristol said Democrats shouldn't try to make a political issue of it. "It's not credible to tar a political party with the misdeeds of one person," he argued.

Before any right-wing talking head makes a similar argument about the Larry Craig scandal, Mike Rogers has one word of advice: Don't. The online activist who first outed Craig last October says Craig's party affiliation is entirely relevant to -- and indeed may explain -- the predicament in which the Republican senator finds himself now.

In an interview with Salon, Rogers says that "lesbians and gays are welcome to be honest and open in the Democratic Party," while "the culture of the Republican Party, from the top down, has always been, 'If you're gay you have to remain in the closet.'"

"When somebody is found out that they're gay, not only are they pushed out of the closet, but they're pushed out of the party in most instances," Rogers says. "And I think that's unfortunate. I mean, I think that with Sen. Craig, I think he should stand up, he should be open and honest with people in Idaho. Had he been open and honest with people, who knows where his career might be today? Who knows what he might have done? Who knows what he might have accomplished?"

Link.

It's the hypocrisy and the life of dishonesty far in excess of the dishonesty of what you could call politics as usual. It's not good for the pol living a lie of a life, and that makes it no good for the nation. And that's why it matters. It's a bigger matter than just another, pardon the expression, closet case.

And speaking of that hypocrisy, here's the man in hypo-action.

And maybe the last word needed to be said is here.

Meet Our Beloved Leader's New BFF

Loves his president so much, he keeps a GWB doll in his drawer. (Hint: he is not a six year old girl.)

Another Lying Paradigm of Virtue

They only talk the talk, only walking the walk to the indictment....

Today's paradigm of fake virtue is here.

Imperialism in Africa Continues to Today

Not exactly quite on the level of old King Leopold. And I suppose it must be noted that it's often enabled by some degree of corruption of the native leaders, but still:

The shareholders' agreement signed by the government when it sold a 30 percent stake in Telkom to the Thintana Communications consortium placed both companies above South Africa's laws, according to a US academic journal.

Thintana Communications was the consortium of US telecommunications group SBC and Telekom Malaysia.

Interviewed in Telecommunications Policy, Jim Myers, described as "SBC's central operative in South Africa between 1994 and 1998", says clauses in the shareholders agreement agreed to in 1997 stipulated that once the Telecommunications Act was in place, neither Telkom nor Thintana would be compelled to follow any legislation that violated the shareholders' agreement.

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True Conservatism, Anti-Americanism

Since, like, 'Nam, I've loved the anti-Americanism of conservatives: We're a superior nation until foreigners hold us to a higher standard (except for some of those who come here to benefit from our superior wealth).

Alleged liberal Thomas Friedman has today's example:

Dive into a conversation about America in the Arab world today, or even in Europe and Africa, and it won’t take 30 seconds before the words “Abu Ghraib” and “Guantánamo Bay” are thrown at you. Yes, both are shameful, but Abu Ghraib was a day at the beach compared to what Al Qaeda and its Sunni jihadist supporters have been doing in Iraq, yet none of their acts have become one-punch global insults like Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

Of course, maybe dising of Osama is also just too obvious to mention....

The Growth of Wealth in Modern America

Same it always was but moreso; wealth ever goes to the monied classes at the expense of the lower classes. The Republican free market, instead of growing wealth, actually destroys what little wealth the lower classes have managed to eke out. Bravo, George W. Bush for having neither brains nor balls, a complete failure of leadership! This is an historical accomplishment:

The median price of American homes is expected to fall this year for the first time since federal housing agencies began keeping statistics in 1950.

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As to how this was accomplished, it started like this:

ON its way to becoming the nation’s largest mortgage lender, the Countrywide Financial Corporation encouraged its sales force to court customers over the telephone with a seductive pitch that seldom varied. “I want to be sure you are getting the best loan possible,” the sales representatives would say.

But providing “the best loan possible” to customers wasn’t always the bank’s main goal, say some former employees. Instead, potential borrowers were often led to high-cost and sometimes unfavorable loans that resulted in richer commissions for Countrywide’s smooth-talking sales force, outsize fees to company affiliates providing services on the loans, and a roaring stock price that made Countrywide executives among the highest paid in America.

Countrywide’s entire operation, from its computer system to its incentive pay structure and financing arrangements, is intended to wring maximum profits out of the mortgage lending boom no matter what it costs borrowers, according to interviews with former employees and brokers who worked in different units of the company and internal documents they provided. One document, for instance, shows that until last September the computer system in the company’s subprime unit excluded borrowers’ cash reserves, which had the effect of steering them away from lower-cost loans to those that were more expensive to homeowners and more profitable to Countrywide.

[more]

Speaking of the Times:

There seems to be an easy hack of TimeSelect, courtesy of the Times. Once registered, set up that new feature, "My Times". Therein, choose columnists; what were normally behind the T$ wall now appear to be fully accetable, no charge. Can this be, though? Time(s) will tell.....

Iraq=Vietnam? Analyze This

Link.

How Our Leaders Decided

Link.

This is How Our Leaders is Improving Iraq

Not; we are failing them. But that's Bush-style: make a worse mess after making a mess.

The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the American troop increase began in February, according to data from two humanitarian groups, accelerating the partition of the country into sectarian enclaves.

Despite some evidence that the troop buildup has improved security in certain areas, sectarian violence continues and American-led operations have brought new fighting, driving fearful Iraqis from their homes at much higher rates than before the tens of thousands of additional troops arrived, the studies show.

The data track what are known as internally displaced Iraqis: those who have been driven from their neighborhoods and seek refuge elsewhere in the country rather than fleeing across the border. The effect of this vast migration is to drain religiously mixed areas in the center of Iraq, sending Shiite refugees toward the overwhelmingly Shiite areas to the south and Sunnis toward majority Sunni regions to the west and north.

Though most displaced Iraqis say they would like to return, there is little prospect of their doing so. One Sunni Arab who had been driven out of the Baghdad neighborhood of southern Dora by Shiite snipers said she doubted that her family would ever return, buildup or no buildup.

“There is no way we would go back,” said the woman, 26, who gave her name only as Aswaidi. “It is a city of ghosts. The only people left there are terrorists.”

Statistics collected by one of the two humanitarian groups, the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, indicate that the total number of internally displaced Iraqis has more than doubled, to 1.1 million from 499,000, since the buildup started in February.

Those figures are broadly consistent with data compiled independently by an office in the United Nations that specializes in tracking wide-scale dislocations. That office, the International Organization for Migration, found that in recent months the rate of displacement in Baghdad, where the buildup is focused, had increased by as much as a factor of 20, although part of that rise could have stemmed from improved monitoring of displaced Iraqis by the government in Baghdad, the capital.

The new findings suggest that while sectarian attacks have declined in some neighborhoods, the influx of troops and the intense fighting they have brought are at least partly responsible for what a report by the United Nations migration office calls the worst human displacement in Iraq’s modern history.

The findings also indicate that the sectarian tension the troops were meant to defuse is still intense in many places in Iraq. Sixty-three percent of the Iraqis surveyed by the United Nations said they had fled their neighborhoods because of direct threats to their lives, and more than 25 percent because they had been forcibly removed from their homes.

The demographic shifts could favor those who would like to see Iraq partitioned into three semi-autonomous regions: a Shiite south and a Kurdish north sandwiching a Sunni territory.

Over all, the scale of this migration has put so much strain on Iraqi governmental and relief offices that some provinces have refused to register any more displaced people, or will accept only those whose families are originally from the area. But Rafiq Tschannen, chief of the Iraq mission for the migration office, said that in many cases, the ability of extended families to absorb displaced relatives was also stretched to the breaking point.

“It’s a bleak picture,” Mr. Tschannen said. “It is just steadily continuing in a bad direction, from bad to worse.”

He also cautioned that reports of people going back to their homes were overstated. As the buildup began, the Iraqi government said that it would take measures to evict squatters from houses that were not theirs and make special efforts to bring the rightful owners back.

“They were reporting that people went back, but they didn’t report that people left again,” Mr. Tschannen said. He added that Iraqis “hear things are better, go back to collect remuneration and pick up an additional suitcase and leave again. It is not a permanent return in most cases.”

American officials in Baghdad did not respond to a request for comment, but the national intelligence estimate released Thursday confirmed that Iraq continues to become more segregated through internal migration. “Population displacement resulting from sectarian violence continues,” it found, “imposing burdens on provincial governments and some neighboring states.”

Dr. Said Hakki, director of the Iraqi Red Crescent Organization, said that he had been surprised when his figures revealed that roughly 100,000 people a month were fleeing their homes during the buildup. Dr. Hakki said that he did not know why the rates were so high but added that some factors were obvious.

“It’s fear,” he said. “Lack of services. You see, if you have a security problem, you don’t need a lot to frighten people.”

It is clear that military operations, both by American troops and the Iraqi forces working with them as part of the buildup, have something to do with the rise in displacement, said Dana Graber Ladek, Iraq displacement specialist for the migration organization’s Iraq office.

“If a surge means that soldiers are on the streets patrolling to make sure there is no violence, that is one thing,” Ms. Ladek said. “If a surge means military operations where there are attacks and bombings, then obviously that is going to create displacement.”

But Ms. Ladek added that, in contrast to the first years of the conflict, when major American offensives were a main cause of displacement, the primary driving force had changed.

“Sectarian violence is the biggest driving factor — militias coming into a neighborhood and kicking all the Sunnis out, or insurgents driving all the Shias away,” Ms. Ladek said.

Her conclusions mirrored the experiences of Iraqis who had fled their homes.

Aswaidi and her family were driven out of the Dora section of Baghdad five months ago when Shiite snipers opened fire on their Sunni neighborhood from nearby tower blocks, shooting through their windows “at all hours of day and night.”

Returning covertly to check on the property in mid-August, she found Sunni insurgents occupying the building and neighboring homes, walking unchallenged through the deserted streets. Nearby, she claims, the same insurgents captured one of the Shiite snipers who drove the residents away, and claimed that he was a 16-year-old Iranian.

She now fears that her entire neighborhood will be taken over by Shiite militias like the Mahdi Army, which is loyal to the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.

“I don’t want them to take my town, but I think they will,” Aswaidi said. “It will change from Sunni to Shia. The Americans can’t stop it.”

Shiites face similarly overwhelming odds. In Shualah, on the northern outskirts of Baghdad, 400 Shiite families now live in a makeshift refugee camp on wasteland commandeered by Mr. Sadr’s followers.

In a sprawl of cinder block hovels and tin and bamboo-roofed shacks, families have stories of being expelled from their homes by Sunni insurgents.

Ali Edan fled Yusifiya, a Sunni insurgent haven south of Baghdad, when his uncle was killed. He has no intention of returning, even though American commanders claim Sunni sheiks there have begun cooperating with them. “It is still an unsafe area,” said Mr. Edan.

Both humanitarian groups based their conclusions on information collected from the displaced Iraqis inside the country. The Red Crescent counted only displaced Iraqis who receive relief supplies, and the United Nations relied on data from an Iraqi ministry that closely tracks Iraqis who leave their homes and register for government services elsewhere.

Before the troop buildup, by far the most significant event causing the displacement of Iraqis was the bombing of a revered Shiite mosque in Samarra in February 2006. The bombing set off a spasm of sectarian killing, but the rate at which Iraqis left their homes leveled off toward the end of that year before accelerating again as the buildup began, the Red Crescent figures show.

The United Nations figures also include a little over a million people it says were displaced in the decades before the Samarra bombing, including the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s. The Red Crescent data does not include them.

In Baghdad, the latest migration involves an enormously complex landscape in which some people flee one district even as others return to it.

In Ghazaliya, a mixed but Sunni-majority district of north Baghdad, one 30-year-old Shiite said his family was driven out by Sunni insurgents a year ago with just two hours notice to leave their home.

Five months ago, the troop buildup brought American soldiers and the Shiite-dominated Iraqi Army onto his street and his family returned. But even as it did, Sunni neighbors fled, knowing that the army had been infiltrated by Shiite militias.

“They are afraid, because the army has good relations with the Mahdi Army,” said the 30-year-old man, who said he was too afraid to give his name. “My area used to have a lot of Sunni. Now most are Shia, because Shias expelled from other places have moved into the empty Sunni homes.”

Link.

Unlike Fox, this is Fake News that Seems Almost Real

Fake but too close to the truth, unlike Faux Nooz, which is all simple lies and propaganda.

Rudy's Brain

The most enduring lesson that Karl Rove taught the American people during his term as George W. Bush's top adviser was to always find out who the candidate's brain is before you elect him or her. For instance, if voters had fully understood that the swaggering, brush-cutting cowboy they elected was under the total sway of a dumpy balding guy with glasses who dropped out of college and believed William McKinley was America's greatest president, they might have thought twice.

***

* * The tutorial begins with a look at Republican frontrunner Rudy Giuliani's chief whisperer, a man named Anthony V. Carbonetti.

You ask: "Who?" And that is exactly the point. The essence of a good candidate whisperer is to stay in the background, at least until after an election. Carbonetti, 38, is the guy with the beefy build, dark hair, usually wearing a gray suit, standing slightly to the right of America's mayor.

Giuliani observers will argue that he needs no one else's brain because his own is so well-developed. But even Rudy's admirers will admit that Carbonetti, whose greatest passions are aroused at a casino blackjack table, is a major influence on the man who may someday soon be deciding whether to take out Tehran with a tactical strike. We thus ignore him at our peril.

Like Rove, Carbonetti has been with his man since the beginning, helping to guide the former federal prosecutor's first successful run for office. Before that, Carbonetti had not been especially busy. At 24, he had dropped out of Boston University and was working as a bartender at the Cityside tavern on Commonwealth Avenue, serving drinks to former school pals. This résumé immediately qualified him to serve as deputy field director of Giuliani's 1993 campaign. It helped that his father, Lou, was a boyhood friend of the candidate's. Even more helpful, Rudy's dad and Lou's dad were tight buddies from the old neighborhood.

When he won City Hall, Giuliani installed his young aide in a little office with the title of "Director of Appointments." Actually, Tony Carbonetti was mostly engaged in disappointments, since his chief task was to smoke out Democrats with city jobs and fire them. He spent his days on the phone, ending careers as fast as he could dial.

The Carbonetti clan's own municipal fortunes were on the rise. Giuliani named Carbonetti's father as the $90,000-a-year director of his community assistance unit. He promoted Carbonetti's mother, JoAnna Aniello, to ever-higher posts at the city's Housing Authority, ultimately giving her a $162,000-a-year commissionership on his way out the door as mayor.

All went swimmingly until it was revealed in the newspapers that Lou Carbonetti had failed to list $150,000 in debts from a failed business on his financial disclosure forms. Curiously, he also held two different drivers' licenses, one of them suspended. The senior Carbonetti had to quit city government, but the mayor found his old friend a new $80,000-a-year post running a Brooklyn development organization. Unfortunately, this job also went off the tracks when Lou Carbonetti pleaded guilty to felony charges for lying to city investigators about his profitable dealings with the group's vendors.

Tony Carbonetti was also forgetful in disclosing his finances, and he was found to have neglected to list $11,000 in defaulted loans from his abbreviated student days. Giuliani's top deputies, all ex-law-enforcement officials, said this didn't matter because they knew all about the old loans anyway.

What mattered was that Tony Carbonetti, as his boss would say, was very, very good at what he did. He moved steadily up the ranks, becoming the mayor's chief of staff in 1999. He proved himself by his delicate handling of such tasks as parades for the Yankees, the big Garth Brooks concert in Central Park, and the Princess Di memorial service. He also took care of it when Nancy Sinatra demanded a statue of her father in Times Square ("Dear Tony," her gushing handwritten notes read).

When he needed a break from these onerous chores, Carbonetti went gambling. He had learned his lesson and was careful to list his winnings on his financial forms. There was Bally's Hotel, $5,000; TropWorld, $20,000, Trump Plaza slots, $5,000; and much more, indicating enormous betting expertise. He also took a trip to Las Vegas with another City Hall aide who owed his job to his father's mayoral ties. Russell Harding later pleaded guilty to stealing $400,000 from the taxpayers for junkets including the Las Vegas jaunt. City and federal investigators were especially curious about Carbonetti's involvement, but no charges were brought.

It wasn't all fun and games, however. In the spring of 2001, the mayor called on his faithful aide to handle one more firing—that of his wife.

Giuliani was in the process of separating from Donna Hanover, his spouse of 16 years, who was still living in the mayoral residence at Gracie Mansion with their two children. For some reason, she had strenuously objected when Giuliani brought his new girlfriend to the mansion. Despite the estrangement, she said, she was still the city's First Lady and thus entitled to a certain level of respect.

Carbonetti was now dispatched to handle this most delicate of situations. His solution has been enshrined in the city's Municipal Archives, where is found this memorable memo he sent to the mayor's wife on May 22, 2001:

"In light of the quite public parting of the ways between Donna Hanover and the Mayor, it is obviously disingenuous and inappropriate for Donna Hanover to continue to act as First Lady or in any other way as a representative of the Mayor." Making sure there were no misunderstandings, he continued: "Donna Hanover will no longer serve as First Lady, and my office will designate spokespersons, as appropriate, to act on behalf of the Mayor."

It was this type of forceful action that Rudy Giuliani must have been thinking of when he wrote these words in his book Leadership: "Looking back, I believe that the skill I developed better than any other was surrounding myself with great people."

After all, even Karl Rove never fired a First Lady.

Link.

The Sub-Prime Mess for Dummies

This time, it really was different; unbridled greed pushed any sense out the door. Wealth was created but for the wrong people.

Von Hoffman:

As the subprime mortgage mess continues to play itself out, certain words that ought to pop up in the discussion are not to be heard. These are words like “fraud,” “conspiracy,” “misrepresentation” and “felony.”

We are looking at more than greed gone awry. We are looking at an industry that tolerated and fostered what the trade calls “ninja loans.” The Wall Street Journal defines a ninja loan as one that “required no income, no job, and no assets.” Anyone issuing a ninja knows damn well that there is a good chance that the home buyer will default. Nevertheless, the ninjas were sold to mortgage bankers who mixed them in with other mortgages, turned the package into bonds and sold them. If the bankers did not know that they were trading in worthless paper, their ignorance has to be willful, and that’s a crime.

Other subprime mortgages are called “no docs.” Such loans, according to The Journal, “didn’t require the lender to verify the borrower’s income.” Until 10 or so years ago it was absolutely impossible to obtain a no doc mortgage in the United States of America. The people and institutions issuing the loan and selling and/or reselling it demanded verification of the borrower’s ability to make the monthly payments. The only reason to issue a no doc loan is to deliberately choose not to know that the home buyer will more than likely not be able to carry the mortgage. Fraud again.

***

Thanks to the puffed-up appraisals, mortgage brokers got large fees as they placed the fraudulent loans with bankers who got their cut as they passed the mortgages on to the next link in the chain. That the home purchasers did not have the income to keep their payments up to date was no problem since, with the assistance of the appraisers, the value of their property was going up all the time; they could make good on the payments by refinancing rotten mortgages with rotten-er mortgages. The yet-more-rotten instrument was the adjustable rate mortgage (ARM), which in and of itself, when ethically used, is a useful financial tool.

The whole thing was too rich for words. Not only did these people clean up with the original mortgage, but more fees and more thieving hanky-panky was there for the using when refinancing time came around. The refis were low-interest ARM’s that after two or more years would reset into high-interest ARM’s, unless of course the value of the property had risen again, thus making a second refi a profitable possibility.

Profitable is hardly the apt word. High on the hog does not describe it. Last year Angelo Mozilo, the founder and boss man of Countrywide Financial Corporation, took home $114 million in his pay envelope.

Apparently the crooked-business crowd thought that their squirrel-in-the-cage financing operation would go on forever. In the end, however, the rodent could no longer keep the cage revolving and collapsed exhausted. Finally, the government stepped in to stop the spinning cage but it was too late.

What was going on was no secret. Inside the housing and finance sectors, and outside of them, there were enough people who understood the essence of this racket. Talk, often intoxicated, greedy talk, about the real estate bubble abounded. We are not looking at another Enron, a case of the books having been cooked in such a manner that it was difficult to tell that this seemingly impressive corporation was in the death rattle phase.

This baby was out in the open for all to see if they wanted to. The politicians blindfolded themselves. The home ownership rate rose to more than 69 percent of households. For practical purposes anybody and everybody in the United States who wanted to own a home could. The people who hung back seem to have been limited to those too infirm to mow a lawn. So the construction industry hummed, furniture marched out of the stores alongside of the new appliances and the wheels of commerce turned so fast they blurred.

For some hundreds of thousands of lower-income minority home seekers the whole thing was a swindle and a bad enough swindle for the Federal Trade Commission to look into what happened. These people were told by real estate agents, appraisers, mortgage brokers and bankers that when they signed on ye olde dotted line they would be buying a house.

But they were not. Their no-down-payment mortgage with its trickery terms and the sneaky fees connected with consummating the deal left the would-be home buyers without any practical hope of building up equity in the property. In essence, under the guise of selling houses, the swindlers were renting to them. The people were renting but at the same time they were their own landlords, responsible for all expenses connected with the property. A more costly form of renting would be difficult to devise. Inasmuch as some of the fattest, most prestigious financial institutions have been partners in screwing those who can least afford it, let’s hope that, lured by the scent of large class action settlements, the lawyers will swoop in to exact a dollop or two of retribution and compensation.

Who's Bad?

Who's the worst, Cheney or Rove? I personally go with Dick (just like Rove's step-daddy!)....

Karl Rove, interchangeably known as "Boy Genius" or "Turd Blossom," has left the White House. The press conference announcing his decision to resign has been given front-page treatment by most major media outlets, but the fact of the matter is the buzz surrounding Rove's departure is much ado about nothing, especially in terms of coming to grips with the remaining 16 months of the worst presidency in the history of the United States.

Rove is a domestic political marauder, the personification of a conservative movement which lacks a moral compass and has a complete disregard for facts. The master of exploiting mainstream America's predilection for news-as-entertainment, under which the likes of Rupert Murdoch can manufacture headlines out of thin air, Rove helped turn "fair and balanced" into a national joke which everyone laughs at but few actually comprehend.

Rove served as the maestro of a political-smear orchestra composed of such intellectually challenged muckrakers as Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, manipulating the NASCAR/professional wrestling crowd's addiction to seedy gossip in an effort to maintain the all-important 51 percent majority needed to win elections.

Perhaps if the Democratic Party had possessed a semblance of organization and cohesion (not to mention a post-Clinton message that could be sold to a majority of America), then Rove would be but a footnote in history, known simply as the man who helped the worst governor in the history of Texas get elected. Even the self-destructive campaign run by Al Gore in 2000, in which he distanced himself from a sitting president who, despite all of his faults, would have defeated Bush in a landslide if the Constitution permitted a third term, was enough to deny Rove his beloved 51 percent -- it was Gore, not Bush, who won the majority of votes in that contest. It took a Republican governor of Florida, backed by a compliant Supreme Court, to put George W. Bush into the White House, not any genius on the part of Rove.

"Bush's Brain" may claim that it was his careful manipulation of fiction over fact that carried the 2004 election, in which the term "Swift-boating" became synonymous with political character assassination, but it was the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the war in Iraq which sank the Democratic Party and its candidate for president, John Kerry.

It is very difficult to unseat a president in a time of war, especially when so many Democrats voted in favor of the concept, first by buying into every post-9/11 policy put forward by the Bush administration (find me one Democrat who actually read the Patriot Act in its entirety before it was voted into law) and second by rubber-stamping the lies that led to Bush's decision to invade Iraq in March 2003. Remember, it was Kerry's inarticulate defense of his decision to vote in favor of granting war powers to the president that sank his election hopes, not his Vietnam War record.

Certainly, Karl Rove played a significant behind-the-scenes role in supporting Bush's war policies. The perjury trial of "Scooter" Libby forced the collective of deaf, dumb and blind pseudo-journalists who populate what is known as the mainstream media in America to recognize how pathetically duplicitous and petty the Bush administration could get when it came to defending the policies propping up the so-called Global War on Terror and the awful tragedy of Iraq. Rove's fingerprints were all over the decision by Vice President Dick Cheney to leak CIA officer Valerie Plame's name to the media in an effort to thwart the truth-telling of her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson.

But that is about as deep as Rove's involvement in the two issues that will define the presidency of George W. Bush gets. While Rove might be the "genius" behind the kind of winner-takes-all dirty politics that won the Republicans a majority in Texas (and brought down the likes of Tom "The Hammer" DeLay), he was way out of his depth when it came to the reality of national security policy. Unlike unsubstantiated rumors of wrongdoing which can stain a political opponent's record for the brief moment needed to gain political advantage, regardless of what the actual truth is, the never-ending flow of dead American service members from a war based on a foundation of lies cannot be overlooked indefinitely, even by the most subservient of media outlets.

Try as Rove and his political operatives might, one cannot forever suppress the images of flag-draped caskets, row upon row of white grave markers sprouting up in cemeteries across America, or the thousands of wounded veterans left to rot in hospitals, forgotten by an administration that, with few exceptions, never knew war and used the military as an electioneering prop. Eventually, those patriotic Americans who were fooled into believing there was actually some coherent planning behind the global conflict Bush had dispatched their youths to fight and die in were bound to get wise. Rove never had the depth needed to navigate such serious waters.

Being the Brain of the most vapid, intellectually shallow president ever creates an apt epitaph for Rove's tenure at the White House. The Bush administration has never won accolades for its substance. Its best frontman, Colin Powell, self-destructed in front of the U.N. Security Council in February 2003. Powell's nemesis, Donald Rumsfeld, followed suit shortly thereafter, unable to coherently explain where Saddam Hussein had hidden all those WMD we went to war for, and ultimately telling the average foot soldier to pound sand when it came to the lack of adequate equipment needed to fight and survive in occupied Iraq.

Bush's singular appeal has been the impression of steadfastness in the eye of the storm, even if the storm is for the most part self-created. For this we must look not to "Bush's Brain," but instead peer deep into the dark recesses of the White House, where we can glimpse the awful "soul" of the president -- Dick Cheney.

The vice president is the single greatest threat to American and international security in the world today. Not Osama Bin Laden. Not the ghost of Saddam Hussein. Not Ahmadinejad or Kim Jung Il. Not al-Qaida, the Taliban, or Jose Padilla himself. Not even George W. Bush can lay claim to this title. It is Dick Cheney's alone. Operating in a never-never land of constitutional ambiguity which exists between the office of the president and the Congress of the United States, Cheney's office has made its impact felt on the policies of the United States of America as had no vice president's office before him. Granted unprecedented oversight over national security and foreign policy by executive order in early 2001, many months prior to the terror attacks of 9/11, Cheney has single-handedly steered America away from being a nation among nations (albeit superior), operating (roughly) in accordance with the rule of law, and toward its present manifestation as the new Rome, a decadent imperial power bent on global domination whatever the cost.

The absolute worst of the rot that has infected America because of the policies and actions of the Bush administration has originated from the office of the vice president. The nonsensical response to the terror attacks of 9/11, seeking a "global war" versus defending the rule of law at home and abroad, taking the lead in spreading the lies that got us involved in Iraq, legitimizing torture as a tool of American jurisprudence, advocating for warrantless wiretappings of U.S.-based communications (regardless of what the Fourth Amendment says against illegal search and seizure), and pushing for an expansion of America's global conflict into Iran--all can be traced back to the person of Cheney as the point of origin.

America today is very much engaged in a life-or-death struggle against the forces of evil. The enemy resides not abroad, however, but at home, vested in the highest offices of the land. Neither Osama Bin Laden nor Saddam Hussein threatened the life blood of the United States--the Constitution--to the extent that Cheney has. Not Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Ho Chi Minh. Not since the American Civil War has there been a constitutional crisis of the magnitude that exists today, threatening to rip the very fabric of American society apart at the seams, courtesy of Dick Cheney.

That Congress today remains relatively mute on this crisis is one of the great mysteries of our time. Perhaps the vagaries of national politics can be blamed. The Democratic majority in Congress appears to have ceded its leadership role to unelected presidential candidates who seem solely empowered to comment on current events, domestic or foreign, and who, out of fear of any misstep which could hurt their chances to seize the White House as their own, refuse to actually take a substantive stand against the policies of the Bush administration. In an effort that is curiously Rovian in the quest for electoral victory, the Democratic candidates (with a few notable exceptions) have been less than bold in their opposition to the heinous policies that are currently in place concerning Iraq, Iran, the war on terror, torture and constitutional violations--unless you count empty rhetoric.

In many ways, the leading Democrats, both those running for office and those currently holding office, are a far greater insult to American values than the conservative standard-bearers for the policies of Cheney. No one of substance takes seriously the manic ranting of the Hannity/Limbaugh/Coulter triad. These Democrats, on the other hand, have mastered the art of compromise to the point that they stand for nothing at all--this at a time in American history when the policies of the administration, derived from the dark abyss of Bush's soul, Cheney, provide the most concrete example of what we as Americans should be standing against.

The Democrats need to stand for something. Cheney has provided the sort of political ammunition that would enable them to fight, and win, a constitutional battle over the heart of America, the kind of defining struggle which I believe the vast majority of Americans would rally around. Unless the Democrats start separating themselves from the policies of the Bush administration, and take an active role in outing and suppressing the true evil that is Dick Cheney, all they will achieve in the coming years is a change in the titular political orientation of America, without the kind of deep-seated break from the failures and crimes of the past six-plus years that have taken our nation, and the world, right up to the edge of chaos.

"Bush's Brain" may be gone, but his "Soul" lives on. It is high time all of America put Dick Cheney fully in the spotlight of collective accountability, purging our nation of this scourge which has harmed us in so many ways. If there is any case for impeachment to be made against any member of the Bush administration today, it can be made against a vice president who has shamed our nation, destroyed our moral standing and broken our laws.

Link.

Who's Bad?

But It's Not Just Here....

Chinese airline paints out logo on crashed airline to save face or for some other unacceptably stupid "reason".

Our Leaders Making Us Safer

TSA stops food, lets blade through.

Our Quislings

Malaki really loves us, us who are bringing his country peace (you know, our people dying so his don't have to or something), not mention putting him in power:

Iraq's prime minister lashed out Wednesday at U.S. criticism, saying no one has the right to impose timetables on his elected government and that his country "can find friends elsewhere."

Such gratitude! It makes the fandango all that more worthwhile....

Our Wonderful Mortgage Meltdown

Contrary to previous normal, accepted practice, Countrywide, one of the major sub-prime lenders can't renegotiate with borrowers were it so inclined to do (which really is the best thing for it financially).

Countrywide's approach to this troublesome situation might be a little skewed by its CEO who had the great, great fortune to make approximately 241 million dollars dumping his company's stock the past few years.

Meanwhile, the Big Media meme is that this is a crisis that is already passing.

Well, notwithstanding the large national homebuilders not quite believing that, there is this, which looks a lot more like a tip of the iceberg that a crisis ending:

U.S. Home Foreclosures Jump Sharply in July, Up 9 Percent From June

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- The number of foreclosure filings reported in the U.S. last month jumped 93 percent from July of 2006 and rose 9 percent from June, the latest sign that homeowners are having trouble making payments and finding buyers during the national housing downturn.
There were 179,599 foreclosure filings reported during July, up from 92,845 during the same period a year ago, Irvine-based RealtyTrac Inc. said Tuesday. There were 164,644 foreclosure filings reported in June.

The national foreclosure rate in July was one filing for every 693 households, the company said.

"While 43 states experienced year-over-year increases in foreclosure activity, just five states -- California, Florida, Michigan, Ohio and Georgia -- accounted for more than half of the nation's total foreclosure filings," RealtyTrac Chief Executive James J. Saccacio said.

The filings include default notices, auction sale notices and bank repossessions.

Some properties included in the survey might have received more than one notice, if the owners have multiple mortgages.

The company did break out individual properties as part of its report for the first six months of this year, when a total of 573,397 properties reported some sort of foreclosure activity.

That represents a 58 percent jump from the 363,672 properties in the first six months of 2006 and a 32 percent increase from the 433,504 in the last six months of 2006, the firm said.

In the July report, Nevada, Georgia and Michigan accounted for the highest foreclosure rates nationwide.

Nevada posted the highest foreclosure rate: one filing for every 199 households, or more than three times the national average. It reported 5,116 filings during the month, an increase of 8 percent from June.

Georgia's foreclosure rate was more than twice the national average, with one filing for every 299 households. The state reported 12,602 foreclosure filings, up 75 percent from June.

Michigan reported 13,979 filings in July, a 39 percent spike from June.

California, Florida and Ohio were among the states with the highest number of foreclosure filings in July, RealtyTrac said.

California cities continued to dominate top metropolitan foreclosure rates.

The state reported 39,013 foreclosure filings last month, the most by any single state. However, the number of filings rose less than 1 percent from June.

The state's foreclosure rate was one filing for every 333 households, RealtyTrac said.

Florida's foreclosure filings dropped 9 percent between June and July to 19,179. The July figure, however, represents a 78 percent jump from the year-ago period.

In recent months, the mortgage industry has been battered by rising defaults and foreclosures, primarily driven by borrowers with subprime loans and adjustable rate mortgages.

Lagging home sales and flat or decreasing home prices have made it more difficult for homeowners who fall behind on payments to sell their homes and clear the debt, spurring the rise in foreclosure activity.

Loan types seeing higher delinquencies and defaults in general are home equity loans or second mortgages used to cover a downpayment, subprime loans to people with shaky credit histories, and Alt-A loans, which can include interest-only and adjustable rate mortgages sold with little or no documentation.

Meet Our Leaders' Agent

The love machine:

Roger J Stone, Jr.

Born: 1952

Gender: Male
Race or Ethnicity: White
Sexual orientation: Straight
Occupation: Government
Party Affiliation: Republican

Nationality: United States
Executive summary: Campaign consultant, GOP dirty trickster

Longtime political operative and no stranger to dirty tricks. Worked for Chuck Colson in 1972 at the Committee to Re-Elect the President (i.e. Nixon). Helped strategize for the Reagan presidential campaign and Arlen Specter's Senate campaign. Worked on Bob Dole and Donald Trump's unsuccessful presidential campaigns. Also appears to have been helping Al Sharpton's 2004 presidential campaign, for some reason.

In 1996, Roger and his wife Nydia purportedly placed an ad in Swing Fever magazine looking for single men and couples to join them in group sex. According to reporting in the National Enquirer and the Star, the copy proclaimed:

C-161,787-DC* INSATIABLE COUPLE
We are hot, athletic and very fit. We are seeking similar couples or exceptional muscular, well hung, single men. She's 40DD-24-36 and bi. She loves to fuck hard and deep. He's 195 lbs., trim, muscular and 8" +. She prefers jocks, miliary men, and body builders. No fat people or smokers need respond. Send photo and phone. No photo, no response! We are interested in DC, VA, MD, NYC, Miami, and LA.

VOICE MAIL 12209

In August 2007, Stone vehemently denied having left the following message on the telephone answering machine of New York Governor Eliot Spitzer's father:

"This is a message for Bernard Spitzer: You will be subpoenaed to testify before the Senate committee on investigations on your shady campaign loans. You will be compelled by the Senate sergeant at arms. If you resist this subpoena, you will be arrested and brought to Albany. And there's not a goddamn thing your phony, psycho, piece-of-shit son can do about it. Bernie, your phony loans are about to catch up with you. You will be forced to tell the truth and the fact that your son's a pathological liar will be known to all."

This despite the fact that according to caller ID logs, the call was placed from a phone number registered to Stone's apartment. Stone added: "Putting together a voice tape that sounds like me wouldn't be hard to do." (And how would he know that?)

Faux Nooz Indeed

FNC hits the campaign trail for the Republicans. Fair. Balanced. Completely fake; FNC lies from it's slogan on.

McCain Takes the Straight Talk Express to Bermuda

Josh thinks it's, well, a weird place to campaign.

But Josh must have forgotten that Bermuda remaining a tax shelter is important to, if not supporters, organizations from whom McCain undoubtedly (but with, you know, straight talk) would love to receive desperately needed contributions.

History; An Actual Iraq-Vietnam Parallel

Couldn't find a quisling that would our orders in 'Nam who could also lead the country competently.

And Our Leaders seem to have the same problem in Eye-raq.

American Justice; Why the Rest of the World is Jealous of Us

Iraq fraud whistleblowers vilified
Cases show fraud exposers have been vilified, fired, or detained for weeks

The Associated Press

One after another, the men and women who have stepped forward to report corruption in the massive effort to rebuild Iraq have been vilified, fired and demoted.

Or worse.

For daring to report illegal arms sales, Navy veteran Donald Vance says he was imprisoned by the American military in a security compound outside Baghdad and subjected to harsh interrogation methods.

There were times, huddled on the floor in solitary confinement with that head-banging music blaring dawn to dusk and interrogators yelling the same questions over and over, that Vance began to wish he had just kept his mouth shut.

He had thought he was doing a good and noble thing when he started telling the FBI about the guns and the land mines and the rocket-launchers — all of them being sold for cash, no receipts necessary, he said. He told a federal agent the buyers were Iraqi insurgents, American soldiers, State Department workers, and Iraqi embassy and ministry employees.

The seller, he claimed, was the Iraqi-owned company he worked for, Shield Group Security Co.

“It was a Wal-Mart for guns,” he says. “It was all illegal and everyone knew it.”

So Vance says he blew the whistle, supplying photos and documents and other intelligence to an FBI agent in his hometown of Chicago because he didn’t know whom to trust in Iraq.

For his trouble, he says, he got 97 days in Camp Cropper, an American military prison outside Baghdad that once held Saddam Hussein, and he was classified a security detainee.

Also held was colleague Nathan Ertel, who helped Vance gather evidence documenting the sales, according to a federal lawsuit both have filed in Chicago, alleging they were illegally imprisoned and subjected to physical and mental interrogation tactics “reserved for terrorists and so-called enemy combatants.”

No noble outcomes

Corruption has long plagued Iraq reconstruction. Hundreds of projects may never be finished, including repairs to the country’s oil pipelines and electricity system. Congress gave more than $30 billion to rebuild Iraq, and at least $8.8 billion of it has disappeared, according to a government reconstruction audit.

Despite this staggering mess, there are no noble outcomes for those who have blown the whistle, according to a review of such cases by The Associated Press.

“If you do it, you will be destroyed,” said William Weaver, professor of political science at the University of Texas-El Paso and senior advisor to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

“Reconstruction is so rife with corruption. Sometimes people ask me, ‘Should I do this?’ And my answer is no. If they’re married, they’ll lose their family. They will lose their jobs. They will lose everything,” Weaver said.

They have been fired or demoted, shunned by colleagues, and denied government support in whistleblower lawsuits filed against contracting firms.

“The only way we can find out what is going on is for someone to come forward and let us know,” said Beth Daley of the Project on Government Oversight, an independent, nonprofit group that investigates corruption. “But when they do, the weight of the government comes down on them. The message is, ’Don’t blow the whistle or we’ll make your life hell.’

“It’s heartbreaking,” Daley said. “There is an even greater need for whistleblowers now. But they are made into public martyrs. It’s a disgrace. Their lives get ruined.”

One whistleblower demoted

Bunnatine “Bunny” Greenhouse knows this only too well. As the highest-ranking civilian contracting officer in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, she testified before a congressional committee in 2005 that she found widespread fraud in multibillion-dollar rebuilding contracts awarded to former Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

Soon after, Greenhouse was demoted. She now sits in a tiny cubicle in a different department with very little to do and no decision-making authority, at the end of an otherwise exemplary 20-year career.

People she has known for years no longer speak to her.

“It’s just amazing how we say we want to remove fraud from our government, then we gag people who are just trying to stand up and do the right thing,” she says.

In her demotion, her supervisors said she was performing poorly. “They just wanted to get rid of me,” she says softly. The Army Corps of Engineers denies her claims.

“You just don’t have happy endings,” said Weaver. “She was a wonderful example of a federal employee. They just completely creamed her. In the end, no one followed up, no one cared.”

No regrets

But Greenhouse regrets nothing. “I have the courage to say what needs to be said. I paid the price,” she says.

Then there is Robert Isakson, who filed a whistleblower suit against contractor Custer Battles in 2004, alleging the company — with which he was briefly associated — bilked the U.S. government out of tens of millions of dollars by filing fake invoices and padding other bills for reconstruction work.

He and his co-plaintiff, William Baldwin, a former employee fired by the firm, doggedly pursued the suit for two years, gathering evidence on their own and flying overseas to obtain more information from witnesses. Eventually, a federal jury agreed with them and awarded a $10 million judgment against the now-defunct firm, which had denied all wrongdoing.

It was the first civil verdict for Iraq reconstruction fraud.

But in 2006, U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III overturned the jury award. He said Isakson and Baldwin failed to prove that the Coalition Provisional Authority, the U.S.-backed occupier of Iraq for 14 months, was part of the U.S. government.

Not a single Iraq whistleblower suit has gone to trial since.

“It’s a sad, heartbreaking comment on the system,” said Isakson, a former FBI agent who owns an international contracting company based in Alabama. “I tried to help the government, and the government didn’t seem to care.”

U.S. shows little support?

One way to blow the whistle is to file a “qui tam” lawsuit (taken from the Latin phrase “he who sues for the king, as well as for himself”) under the federal False Claims Act.

Signed by Abraham Lincoln in response to military contractors selling defective products to the Union Army, the act allows private citizens to sue on the government’s behalf.

The government has the option to sign on, with all plaintiffs receiving a percentage of monetary damages, which are tripled in these suits.

It can be a straightforward and effective way to recoup federal funds lost to fraud. In the past, the Justice Department has joined several such cases and won. They included instances of Medicare and Medicaid overbilling, and padded invoices from domestic contractors.

But the government has not joined a single quit tam suit alleging Iraq reconstruction abuse, estimated in the tens of millions. At least a dozen have been filed since 2004.

“It taints these cases,” said attorney Alan Grayson, who filed the Custer Battles suit and several others like it. “If the government won’t sign on, then it can’t be a very good case — that’s the effect it has on judges.”

The Justice Department declined comment.

Placed under guard, kept in seclusion

Most of the lawsuits are brought by former employees of giant firms. Some plaintiffs have testified before members of Congress, providing examples of fraud they say they witnessed and the retaliation they experienced after speaking up.

Julie McBride testified last year that as a “morale, welfare and recreation coordinator” at Camp Fallujah, she saw KBR exaggerate costs by double- and triple-counting the number of soldiers who used recreational facilities.

She also said the company took supplies destined for a Super Bowl party for U.S. troops and instead used them to stage a celebration for themselves.

“After I voiced my concerns about what I believed to be accounting fraud, Halliburton placed me under guard and kept me in seclusion,” she told the committee. “My property was searched, and I was specifically told that I was not allowed to speak to any member of the U.S. military. I remained under guard until I was flown out of the country.”

Halliburton and KBR denied her testimony.

She also has filed a whistleblower suit. The Justice Department has said it would not join the action. But last month, a federal judge refused a motion by KBR to dismiss the lawsuit.

'I thought I was among friends'

Donald Vance, the contractor and Navy veteran detained in Iraq after he blew the whistle on his company’s weapons sales, says he has stopped talking to the federal government.

Navy Capt. John Fleming, a spokesman for U.S. detention operations in Iraq, confirmed the detentions but said he could provide no further details because of the lawsuit.

According to their suit, Vance and Ertel gathered photographs and documents, which Vance fed to Chicago FBI agent Travis Carlisle for six months beginning in October 2005. Carlisle, reached by phone at Chicago’s FBI field office, declined comment. An agency spokesman also would not comment.

The Iraqi company has since disbanded, according the suit.

Vance said things went terribly wrong in April 2006, when he and Ertel were stripped of their security passes and confined to the company compound.

Panicking, Vance said, he called the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, where hostage experts got on the phone and told him “you’re about to be kidnapped. Lock yourself in a room with all the weapons you can get your hands on.”’

The military sent a Special Forces team to rescue them, Vance said, and the two men showed the soldiers where the weapons caches were stored. At the embassy, the men were debriefed and allowed to sleep for a few hours. “I thought I was among friends,” Vance said.

An unspoken Baghdad rule

The men said they were cuffed and hooded and driven to Camp Cropper, where Vance was held for nearly three months and his colleague for a little more than a month. Eventually, their jailers said they were being held as security internees because their employer was suspected of selling weapons to terrorists and insurgents, the lawsuit said.

The prisoners said they repeatedly told interrogators to contact Carlisle in Chicago. “One set of interrogators told us that Travis Carlisle doesn’t exist. Then some others would say, ’He says he doesn’t know who you are,”’ Vance said.

Released first was Ertel, who has returned to work in Iraq for a different company. Vance said he has never learned why he was held longer. His own interrogations, he said, seemed focused on why he reported his information to someone outside Iraq.

And then one day, without explanation, he was released.

“They drove me to Baghdad International Airport and dumped me,” he said.

When he got home, he decided to never call the FBI again. He called a lawyer, instead.

“There’s an unspoken rule in Baghdad,” he said. “Don’t snitch on people and don’t burn bridges.”

For doing both, Vance said, he paid with 97 days of his life.

Link.

All Hail Our Victorious Imperial Leader!

Link.

Our Deluded Big Media

Alterman agrees with me, but with facts:

Thomas Patterson of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government did a study of US news media from 1980 to 1999 and found that news stories that had no clear connection to policy issues increased from less than 35 percent of all stories in 1980 to roughly 50 percent in 2000, and taking all news outlets into account, approximately 25 percent of news stories contained a moderate-to-high level of sensationalism in 1980 compared with nearly 40 percent in 2000. And yet the period Patterson studied was a Golden Age compared with the present.

According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism's News Index for the first week in June of this year, for instance, the fifth biggest story of the week was the on-again, off-again incarceration of Paris Hilton. On cable, Paris ranked number three and on radio, four. Still, her story was a piker compared with the death of the no-less-famous-for-no-good-reason Anna Nicole Smith. According to PEJ, during February 8 and 9, coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death made up roughly 60 percent of the morning news shows. To say nothing of the wall-to-wall cable coverage it received. And yet, according to Pew, viewer interest in Smith's death ranked in the bottom third of stories covered that quarter, not only way below the number of people who claim to follow closely the news about Iraq but also below those who continue to maintain a deep interest in global warming. (Cable's attention to the Iraq War ranged from a mere 8 percent of coverage on Fox News to 18 percent on CNN during the second quarter of 2007.)

No less misguided is the news business's pursuit of a public it believes has shifted rightward. While it may be a staple of punditry to assume Americans have grown more conservative in recent decades, the data disagree. As political scientists Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson observe, "It is striking that across all of the major left-right issues, one is hard pressed to find any evidence that Americans are markedly more conservative today than they were in the recent (and even relatively distant) past." No doubt the political system has moved rightward. Careful calculations by political economists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal demonstrate that the average Republican member of Congress was 73 percent more conservative in 2003 than his 1973 counterpart, and his Senate colleague was approximately twice as right-wing. While the Poole/Rosenthal calculations find the average 2003 Democratic member of Congress to be 28 percent more liberal than his early 1970s counterpart, this is almost entirely due to the sudden political extinction of the party's conservative Southern wing. Non-Southern Democrats have actually traveled a bit to the right. Meanwhile, on most issues, the majority of Americans have actually moved slightly leftward--leaving the center of gravity of the political system well to the right of the public on issue after issue.

What appears to be going on here is not a rise in the size of the audience that prizes Fox News-style nonsense. Rather, it's that the proportion of people who get their news from traditional sources has sunk significantly. Given their relative paucity of production values, talk-radio and cable news programs can be profitably sustained with audiences that are a fraction of those required by broadcast and entertainment programs. The fact that most Americans find themselves increasingly alienated from the system that Rupert Murdoch, Roger Ailes and Rush Limbaugh have pioneered has not led their competitors to rethink the content of their broadcasts, only to focus more intensely on what remains of their diminishing audiences. Given the tendency of so many reporters to follow the herd news of the day--Edwards's haircut, Hillary's cleavage--the net result is a perversion of our political process in pursuit of an understandably alienated American public.

Can you imagine a worse way to run a democracy?