What Our Leaders Have Accomplished in Iraq

AMY GOODMAN: Nir Rosen is an independent journalist and the author of In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq. He is a fellow at the New America Foundation and has reported extensively from Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003.

Earlier this year, Nir Rosen wrote a piece, a cover story for the New York Times Sunday Magazine, called “The Flight from Iraq.” He estimated up to 50,000 Iraqis were leaving their homes each month.

Nir Rosen joins us now from our firehouse studio here in New York, just returned from Beirut on Sunday night. Welcome to Democracy Now!

NIR ROSEN: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk further about the refugee crisis? Again, lay out the numbers that we’re talking about inside Iraq and outside.

NIR ROSEN: Outside Iraq, we’re approaching three million refugees who have left since 2003. There were, of course, refugees who left before then, due to Saddam and other factors.

Inside, I think you have a similar number of internally displaced Iraqis fleeing their homes in mixed areas and going to more homogenous areas. Sunnis from Basra are heading to Sunni neighborhoods, Baghdad, or all the way up to Kurdistan. Shias from Diyala province are going to safer areas for Shias. Kurds from Mosul going up to Kurdistan, as well.

And a family like the one we just saw on the show is never going to go back to their home again, actually, it seems.

AMY GOODMAN: Why?

NIR ROSEN: Iraq has been changed irrevocably, I think. I don’t think Iraq even -- you can say it exists anymore. There has been a very effective, systematic ethnic cleansing of Sunnis from Baghdad, of Shias --from areas that are now mostly Shia. But the Sunnis especially have been a target, as have mixed families like the one we just saw. With a name like Omar, he’s distinctly Sunni -- it’s a very Sunni name. You can be executed for having the name Omar alone. And Baghdad is now firmly in the hands of sectarian Shiite militias, and they’re never going to let it go.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think of Senator Levin calling for the Maliki and the whole government to disband?

NIR ROSEN: Well, it’s stupid for several reasons. First of all, the Iraqi government doesn’t matter. It has no power. And it doesn’t matter who you put in there. He’s not going to have any power. Baghdad doesn’t really matter, except for Baghdad. Baghdad used to be the most important city in Iraq, and whoever controlled Baghdad controlled Iraq. These days, you have a collection of city states: Mosul, Basra, Baghdad, Kirkuk, Irbil, Sulaymaniyah. Each one is virtually independent, and they have their own warlords and their own militias. And what happens in Baghdad makes no difference. So that’s the first point.

Second of all, who can he put in instead? What does he think he’s going to put in? Allawi or some secular candidate? There was a democratic election, and the majority of Iraqis selected the sectarian Shiite group Dawa, Supreme Council of Islamic Revolution, the Sadr Movement. These are movements that are popular among the majority of Shias, who are the majority of Iraq. So it doesn’t matter who you put in there. And people in the Green Zone have never had any power. Americans, whether in the government or journalists, have been focused on the Green Zone from the beginning of the war, and it’s never really mattered. It’s been who has power on the street, the various different militias, depending on where you are -- Sunni, Shia, tribal, religious, criminal. So it just reflects the same misunderstanding of Iraqi politics. The government doesn’t do anything, doesn’t provide any services, whether security, electricity, health or otherwise. Various militias control various ministries, and they use it as their fiefdoms. Ministries attack other ministries

AMY GOODMAN: Which is the most powerful militia?

NIR ROSEN: Well, the various Shia ones, such as the Mahdi Army, the Badr Corps, the police, the Iraqi police, the Iraqi army. Of course, the American army is also another militia, and it’s a very powerful militia in Iraq -- maybe not the most powerful. But the Mahdi Army basically controls the police and the Iraqi army. Of course, in the north the police are more in the hands of various Kurdish militias, and the army is in the hands of Kurdish militias. So it sort of depends where you are.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re going to break. When we come back, we are going to talk more about the refugees throughout the Middle East. There are not many here in this country. We’re talking to Nir Rosen, independent journalist, author of In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq. Stay with us.

[break]

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Nir Rosen, independent journalist, author of In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq, a fellow at the New America Foundation, has reported extensively from Iraq since the US-led invasion in 2003, most recently has just returned from Beirut, actually on Sunday night, and has particularly focused on refugees. His piece in the New York Times is called "The Flight from Iraq."

Talk about why people go to different countries, why Iraqis go in this -- you’re saying up to three million Iraqis out of a population of what? Some 27 million?

NIR ROSEN: Twenty-six, twenty-seven, originally, yeah. Nobody knows for sure.

AMY GOODMAN: More than -- so, close to 10%.

NIR ROSEN: Yes, and, of course, up to a million have died --

AMY GOODMAN: More than 10%

NIR ROSEN: -- since the occupation began. Well, there are various factors for why they choose different countries. Access is one of them. Syria is the most open and generous of all the countries in the region. They basically take anybody who comes in. And for a long time, they were giving them free healthcare, and they still provide free education. Well, they’ve been -- they are being overburdened, as well, because the Syrian government subsidizes things such as bread. So every loaf of bread an Iraqi buys is actually being paid for in part by the Syrian government. As a result, they’re finding it more and more difficult to bear the cost.

The Jordanians basically closed their borders by the end of 2005, in part because they were being overburdened, and they also have demographic issues to worry about. Half of the small Jordanian population are Palestinian, and now you’ve introduced another million Iraqis. And this is a very fragile regime in the first place, the Jordanian dictatorship.

AMY GOODMAN: What does each country gain by letting in Iraqi refugees?

NIR ROSEN: Well, Jordan took in initially many of the wealthier ones, as did Egypt, and so they certainly gained a great deal of money and investment, and they required for residency a certain amount of money in the bank. But Jordan was a less friendly environment for Shias. Syria, again, is the most friendly environment for really any Iraqi; Shias, Sunnis, Christians each find welcoming neighborhoods there. Lebanon, very difficult to get to, and there’s a likelihood of being expelled by the Lebanese government, but Christian Iraqis have found that the Christians of Lebanon have been generous in protecting them. Shia Iraqis have tended to go into the Shia neighborhoods of Beirut. Egypt closed its borders more or less after about 150,000 Iraqis came in, mostly Sunni. The majority of the Iraqi Arab refugees are Sunnis, despite the fact that Sunnis are a minority in Iraq. And Sweden has taken in, I think, 40,000 or 50,000, as well. They’ve been quite generous. As you’ve said, we took in about 700, which is a laughable amount.

AMY GOODMAN: What are the politics of this, given that the US said they went into Iraq to save the people of Iraq, only allowing in 700 here?

NIR ROSEN: Well, there are various reasons for why they won’t take them in. I think the fact that they’re Arab and Muslim is probably one of them. The main factor is probably that if you take any refugees, you’re admitting that your whole program in Iraq is a failure. If Iraq is exporting refugees, people are fleeing Iraq for their lives, then everything we’ve done is a failure, which indeed it is, of course, failure.

And there are also security reasons. Homeland Security Department is finding it difficult to screen the Iraqis and difficult to even send their people to various embassies to initiate the screening process. That’s taken a painfully long time logistically.

AMY GOODMAN: Why can't they screen them?

NIR ROSEN: I think it’s just incompetence and sort of a lack of interest. And one of the factors that prevents Iraqis from getting visas, for example, if you’ve paid a ransom. Many Iraqis, virtually every family I know of, have been victims of kidnapping. If you pay a ransom to release your relative from kidnapping, according to the US government, you have materially supported terrorism, and therefore you can be prevented from obtaining a visa to the US.

AMY GOODMAN: If you’ve paid any kind of ransom?

NIR ROSEN: Yes.

AMY GOODMAN: Governments have paid ransoms, like the Italian government, for people to be released from Iraq.

NIR ROSEN: Yes, I’m sure the US government has, as well, but this has been an obstacle for Iraqis. And in general, there’s an aversion, it seems, on the part of America to take in Arabs or Muslims, and Iraqis, in particular. I think Christians have a much better time, Iraqi Christians, as informally the West, whether Australia, England, America, are more likely to take in Christians and are more interested in their plight. I think there’s also stronger interest groups in the West, in Canada and the US, who are active on behalf of the Iraqi Christians.

AMY GOODMAN: What does it do to the politics of a country, to Syria, to Jordan, to Lebanon, having the Iraqi refugees come in? And then, I want to broaden that to: what is the effect of the war on these countries?

NIR ROSEN: Well, when we think of the Iraqi refugee crisis, we have to think of the crisis that people in the region think of in relation to that one, and that’s the Palestinian refugee crisis. In 1948, up to 800,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homes in Palestine to make way for what became Israel. They went to Lebanon, Syria, Jordan. There were put in refugee camps. Eventually, after a few years, they were militarized, mobilized. They had their own militias. They were engaged in attacks, trying to liberate their homes. And they eventually were instrumentalized by the various governments, whether Lebanon, Syria, Jordan. Different groups used them. And they were massacred, as well, by the Lebanese, by the Jordanians. They contributed to destabilization of Jordan, of Lebanon, as well.

And I think you will see something similar happening with the Iraqis, because we have much larger numbers, approaching three million, and many of them already have links with militias back home, of course, because to survive in Iraq you need some militia to protect you. And there are long-established smuggling routes for weapons, for fighters, etc.

And add to that the very sensitive sectarian issue in Syria, in Jordan. The Syrian regime is a minority regime perceived by radical Sunnis to be a heretical. Syria is a majority Sunni country. The majority of the refugees are Sunni. Syria has a good relationship with a Shia-dominated Iraqi government. There have been various Islamist opposition groups who have sought to overthrow their government in Syria. Jordan, as well, has its own Islamist opposition. We’re likely eventually to see, as Sunnis are pushed more and more out of Baghdad and as the militias are pushed into the Anbar Province, that they might link up with Islamist groups in Syria, in Jordan, in Lebanon.

So I think it’s wrong to think of Iraq as its own conflict. There’s now a regional conflict. It’s going to involve Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon. And I think we’ll see governments being overthrown -- for example, the one in Jordan. What we already see are fighters being exported, for example, the fighting in Lebanon the past few months. Many Iraq veterans have sought shelter in Lebanon among -- in the Palestinian refugee camps, for example.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about that, what’s happening right now in Lebanon with Fatah al-Islam, with, in particular, the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp.

NIR ROSEN: Well, Nahr al-Bared refugee camp doesn’t exist anymore. It’s been wiped out completely. The Lebanese army destroyed, flattened completely a refugee camp that at once housed 40,000 people. And they’ve now been made homeless. They left with only their shirts on their backs, basically.

What provoked this conflict was the existence of a group called Fatah al-Islam that declared itself in late 2006. They sort of piggybacked onto a pre-existing Palestinian group, a secular one called Fatah Intifada, taking advantage of, I think, benign neglect on the part of Syria and a very welcoming environment in northern Lebanon, where you have Salafis already work in close reliance with the Sunni-dominated Future Movement. And it seems like, as Sy Hersh explained in his article, the Future Movement, led by Saad Hariri, hoped that they could take advantage of the presence of the Salafis and jihadists in the camps and elsewhere to be sort of the Sunni militia against Hezbollah. But these groups weren’t interested in fighting Shias. They were more interested in fighting Israel, the US, the crusaders, and establishing their own sort of Islamic emirate in the north. And as a result, there’s been a very brutal and bloody clash with the Lebanese army and security forces.

They took advantage of the fact that the Palestinian camps in Lebanon are basically autonomous in terms of security. The Lebanese security forces weren’t allowed, thanks to an agreement several decades ago, to actually enter the camps. And some of these camps, Ayn al-Hilwah, south of Beirut, have long been exporting jihadists to Iraq. What happened about a year ago was that the flow was reversed, and fighters from Iraq began seeking shelter elsewhere. They can’t go to Jordan. They can’t go to Syria. Lebanon was a much more permissive environment -- no strong state, no strong security forces, Palestinian camps already sort of lawless, and a place where Lebanese seek shelter if they’re absconding from the law, and a very friendly environment for Salafis in the Sunni areas because of the increased sectarian tensions in Lebanon.

People in Lebanon are viewing their conflict, especially Sunnis, within a context of the Iraq conflict. They believe in these conspiracy theories about the Shia “Crescent,” about a Shia program, and Iran is exporting its revolution in the region. These are baseless sort of fears, but they’re very strong fears held on the part of Sunnis. And as a result, the Sunnis of Lebanon are looking for their own militia to protect them from what they believe is Hezbollah’s attempts to control the country.

AMY GOODMAN: What about the comments of Seymour Hersh, the investigation that he did, specifically saying that the US and Saudi governments are covertly backing militant Sunni groups like Fatah al-Islam as part of an overarching foreign policy to go after Iran and the Shia influence?

NIR ROSEN: Well, Sy Hersh and I deal with sort of different levels, in the sense that most of my work was on the ground in refugee camps and in poor neighborhoods of Lebanon. So I dealt with the actual militias, not on the geopolitical level with the people who might be sponsoring them. So I found no evidence that the US government or Saudi Arabia were directly involved.

What is clear, however, is that jihadist groups in Lebanon are being sponsored and assisted by various Salafis in Lebanon who are very close with the Lebanese government and who support the March 14 Movement. And money is coming in certainly from Saudi Arabia from rich patrons. They are well armed -- very new weapons compared to the Lebanese army -- laptops, very well fed. And some of their apartments are rented by people who are closely associated with the Lebanese government.

But given where I was, there was no direct US involvement, as far as I can see. It would be very foolish for the US to support these jihadists. I think the Lebanese government and its allies found that it was also very dangerous for them, that they cannot control these people and use them for their own ends. We tried this ourselves in Afghanistan and are still suffering as a result of that. And these groups in Lebanon, I think, actually ended up taking advantage of the Lebanese authorities, instead of the other way around.

AMY GOODMAN: We’re talking to Nir Rosen, independent journalist, author of In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq. He has just come out of Lebanon, has been looking at refugees, the mass crisis. I mean, you’re putting the numbers now at, well, over five million numbers, with those refugees inside Iraq, the internally displaced, around two million, and then you’re saying three million outside.

NIR ROSEN: I think almost three million inside. I mean, the rate is increasing so fast every day, every month 30,000 to 50,000 are leaving their homes.

AMY GOODMAN: Where does the UN come into this and refugee camps in these countries?

NIR ROSEN: Well, until now, there haven’t really been refugee camps outside of Iraq. Iraqis have sort of blended into the urban environments of Amman, Jordan; Damascus, Syria; Beirut; Cairo. These are urban people who have fled, and they prefer an urban environment. There’s a taboo about refugee camps. And the governments have not set up refugee camps either. So this makes it harder to help them and harder to track them, as well.

Within Iraq, there have been some camps set up for the internally displaced in southern Iraq. But about 150,000 to 200,000 Iraqis have fled to northern Iraq -- Irbil, Sulaymaniyah, Dahuk -- and they have also just rented homes in urban areas in towns.

The UN was very slow to respond, in part because of a lack of funding, in part because the UN was still in a sort of intellectual mode where they were assisting the Iraqi government. There was a reconstruction effort, stability effort, development, not dealing with the humanitarian crisis, because usually it’s the other way around. You solve the refugee crisis first, and then you initiate the reconstruction, development, etc. Iraq was unusual in that sense, in that what initially was a reconstruction effort became a humanitarian crisis. And the UN was reluctant to admit it, that there was a humanitarian crisis, because that would imply the Iraqi government, which is assisting, is a failure. And, in fact, the Iraqi government is a party in the conflict and is one of the main actors in prolonging this conflict, to the extent that we can even say that there isn’t an Iraqi government.

So the UN has been very late, in part because it depends on funders. You can’t blame the UN. The UN is basically America and the donor countries. But there was this lazy intellectual process of recognizing that Iraq is a failure. And, of course, the UN was traumatized by, first, the failure to prevent the war in Iraq -- and it’s been seeking a mission ever since then -- and, of course, the bombing in August 2003, which basically expelled the UN from Iraq.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you make of the Syrian prime minister Monday saying that his country will help rebuild Iraq, help Iraqis rebuild Iraq?

NIR ROSEN: I think it’s optimistic. I don’t think anybody can really help Iraq at this point. And Syria lacks the funds. We in the West have been focused too much on Iran and Syria, as if they are the solution to Iraq, or the problem or the cause of the problem, whereas, in fact, this is mainly an internal conflict. And there isn’t much that a country like Syria can do. The US, with all of its troops and all of its money, has failed completely.

Syria does have the advantage of having a good relationship with all the parties in the conflict. It’s been very good at maintaining relations with Sunni resistance groups, with Shia radicals like Muqtada al-Sadr. Maliki, the prime minister, actually lived in Syria for a long time. President Talabani was in exile in Syria when he established his own political party, the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan. So Syria does have a very good relationship, and it could be the key to bringing some of the Iraqi groups together. But at this time, I think there’s actually no hope.

AMY GOODMAN: Nir, what about Iran? What about the whole Bush-Cheney push to attack Iran? And what is the significance of this? And how does it play out in these countries?

NIR ROSEN: Well, I think we’re dealing with a mentality on the part of our administration that nobody else is going to have the guts to take on Iran in the future, the next president, so if we don’t do it, who’s going to do it, and we’ll be vindicated in the future just like Reagan was vindicated, allegedly, for bringing down the Soviet Union. So they have this long-term view of how history will treat them, and if they don’t take down Iran, nobody else will, which is probably the case, although they can’t take down Iran, either.

Iran is not Iraq. You can bomb it, but I think you’d only basically strengthen the support for the government, as always happens when you bomb a country. We saw this in Yugoslavia and elsewhere. And they’ve been blaming Iran for everything under the sun lately, for supporting Sunni radicals in Iraq or attacking the Iranian-backed leadership in Iraq, for attacking -- and then they blame Iran for supporting the Taliban, who, of course, were bitter enemies of Iran. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.

AMY GOODMAN: And interestingly, the president of Afghanistan, Karzai, coming in and saying Iran is a partner and then receiving Ahmadinejad in Afghanistan, and President Bush at the same time attacking Iran.

NIR ROSEN: Well, the countries in the region know that they can’t lose Iran as an ally and as a neighbor. The US can easily alienate Iran, without suffering too many consequences. But Iraq does depend on Iran as a friendly neighbor, likewise Afghanistan. And if you were to antagonize Iran, of course, the consequences would be much more severe than antagonizing Iraq, which had a very weak army.

AMY GOODMAN: What are the politics? Why is Bush doing this, escalating the rhetoric?

NIR ROSEN: Well, there is a general aversion on the part of the US administration towards any Islamist movement or government. This is why they brought down the Islamic Courts in Somalia, this is why they overthrew the Hamas democratically elected government in Palestine, this is why they refuse to deal with Hezbollah, an overwhelmingly popular movement in Lebanon: I think a fear of any successful Islamist model. And then, we’ve had a long animosity with Iran. We haven’t forgiven them, I think, for the hostage crisis a few decades ago.

And I think we’re now in search of a new enemy. When I wrote my book, I was doing research on LexisNexis, and I found that in May 2003 universally the US press was talking about when do we got to war against Iran? Iraq has been such a success. We brought down Saddam’s regime so quickly. So now, Iran is next, obviously. And everybody was behind this, of course.

AMY GOODMAN: The Lieberman-sponsored resolution condemning Iranians fighting in Iraq for killing US soldiers, but then the report coming out that there are more Saudi fighters in Iraq than Iranian fighters.

NIR ROSEN: It’s difficult for me to understand why the Shias would need Iranian fighters. Iraqis are very good at killing, as we’ve seen. Shias were in the army. They were the majority of the army. Shias were in the Fedayeen Saddam, as well. And they’ve been very eager to fight the Americans -- the Mahdi Army, other groups.

So Iran might be sponsoring various Shia militias, of course. It has its own proxies in Iraq: the Supreme Council, one of our main allies, the Dawa Party, one of our main allies, the Sadr Movement to a lesser extent, and, of course, some of the Kurdish parties, as well. Iran has a very good relationship with various Iraqi movements.

I am skeptical that they are actually sending fighters to Iraq. I just don’t see the need for it. Iraqis are very well trained. They might be sending some weapons. But then again, there’s also a black market in weapons, so just because a weapon is Iranian doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily been sold by Iran. Various groups use American weapons. It doesn’t mean that the Americans are arming people, although, in fact, we are arming militias.

I mean, it’s very hypocritical for the US to complain about any foreign intervention in Iraq in the first place, given that we occupied Iraq and destroyed it, and now we’re arming Sunni militias in various neighborhoods, making the situation much worse. In various Sunni neighborhoods of Baghdad, we’re creating our own militias. We are the ones who armed the police and the army, who are, in effect, controlled by a sectarian Shia militia. So it’s absurd to take the American accusations seriously, except that they are intending to go to war against Iran.

AMY GOODMAN: On that issue, Nir Rosen, Time magazine ran an article this week called “Prelude to an Attack on Iran.” It ends with a quote from an unnamed US official: “There will be an attack on Iran,” he said.

NIR ROSEN: I mean, this is just such a foolish game to play. American soldiers are basically held hostage in Iraq. They can’t leave, and they can’t stay. And Iran has the ability to make things much more difficult for the Americans. Until now, while we are fighting Shia militias, Shia resistance groups, it’s not a sort of universal uprising on the part of Shias. We did face that a little bit in 2004, and it was very difficult for the Americans. But Iran does have the ability to mobilize Iraqi Shias, of course, against the Americans and, if it wanted to, to sponsor other groups that might want to fight the Americans.

Iran, until now, I think, has been the primary beneficiary of the US war in Iraq, in that their people are the ones in charge, and their main enemy, or one of them after Israel, Saddam Hussein, was removed. So we could have seen Iran as an ally in all this, and I think that we could have seen them as an ally in Afghanistan, as well. But we’ve chosen to invent an enemy where we didn’t have one before.

AMY GOODMAN: David Petraeus, the general, this report that’s coming out, along with the Ambassador Crocker, the second week of September, it’s now reported, they may well be reporting on September 11th to Congress. What is the significance of this?

NIR ROSEN: I don’t think it’s significant. What can they say that would make any impact one way or the other?

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think has to happen?

NIR ROSEN: In Iraq? It’s too late for anything good to happen in Iraq, unfortunately. If the Americans stay, we’ll see a continuation of this civil war, of ethnic cleansing, until all of Iraq is sort of ethnically -- or sectarian, homogenous zones, which is basically what’s already happened. If the Americans leave, then you’ll see greater intervention of Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Syria, supporting their own militias in Iraq and being drawn into battle.

But no matter what, Iraq doesn’t exist anymore. Baghdad will never be in the hands of Sunnis again. Baghdad will be controlled by Shia militias. They’ve been cleansing all the Sunnis from Baghdad. So Sunnis are basically being pushed out of Iraq, period. They can go to the Anbar Province, which isn’t a very friendly place. I think you’ll see that there won’t be any more elections in Iraq. Maliki is the last prime minister Iraq will have for a long time. There is neither the infrastructure for elections anymore, nor the desire to have them, nor the ability of Iraqi groups to cooperate anymore. So what you’ll see is basically Mogadishu in Iraq: various warlords controlling small neighborhoods. And those who are by major resources, such as oil installations, obviously will be foreign-sponsored warlords who will be able to cut deals with us, the Chinese. But Iraq is destroyed, and I think we’ll see that this will spread throughout the region, and this will destabilize Syria, Lebanon and Jordan, as well.

AMY GOODMAN: Before we wrap up, I want to talk about the Occupied Territories, about Gaza and the West Bank, particularly Gaza now, the news out, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza enduring a fifth day of power blackouts. The outages began after the European Union suspended its funding of Gaza’s main electricity plant. What’s happening now?

NIR ROSEN: Well, Hamas was elected democratically in elections that the US President Jimmy Carter and the international community recognized were free and fair. We, of course, were very upset that Hamas won the elections, and we imposed sanctions on them and tried to overthrow the government in a soft coup, by basically strangling the economy. And that didn’t work. As a result, we increased the heat on Hamas. We began training and sponsoring Fatah militias, with the cooperation of Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and, of course, Israel, and attempted to overthrow the Hamas democratically elected government. And that, too, failed. And Hamas actually managed to eject the Fatah militias from Gaza.

And, of course, now, thanks to US pressure, the Europeans, who would like to deal with Hamas, who have a much more realistic view of the Middle East, are unable to do so. And, I mean, all you’re doing is actually radicalizing this group. This is one of the more moderate Islamist groups in the region, in fact, and they were willing to negotiate with Israel. But what you do when you allow a group like this to take part in elections, and then when they win you try to overthrow them, is merely radicalize them and encourage the Salafis, those with leanings towards al-Qaeda.

AMY GOODMAN: Explain what you mean by Salafis.

NIR ROSEN: Salafis, like the Wahabis of Saudi Arabia, a much stricter interpretation of Islam, generally they reject any innovations and any form of modernity, any deviations from what they perceive as a true Islam, whether Shiism or influences of modernity, of reform. And they often, as well, believe that if you don’t follow their line of thinking, you’re a heretic, you’re an infidel, and you can be killed. Zarqawi was a Salafi, for example.

And these movements are not very strong in Palestine yet. But what we're doing is taking a moderate group like Hamas and actually encouraging them to be more radical, telling them that negotiations, politics, elections won’t work, all you have is violence. It is such a foolish process, because you can’t push them into the sea, which is what Israel would like to do, of course. But if you keep them in this prison, which is Gaza, and you bomb them every day, which is what Israel is doing, and they’ve killed -- since Israel withdrew from Gaza, they’ve killed over 150 children and hundreds of civilians. So it’s not exactly withdrawal in the first place.

AMY GOODMAN: What do you think needs to happen there?

NIR ROSEN: What needs to happen at this point is a one-state solution, where Palestinian refugees are allowed to go back to their homes, where Israel is a state for Jews and non-Jews alike, a state for its citizens. And this one-state solution is inevitable. I think the choice that Israeli Jews have is whether they accept it peacefully, following the model in South Africa, or do they wait a few decades and have to deal with a much more violent uprising on the part of the Arab Israeli population and the population in the West Bank and Gaza? But I think, one way or the other, it’s inevitable that Israel can’t exist as a Jewish state that doesn’t give equal rights to its non-Jewish Arab citizens.

AMY GOODMAN: Nir Rosen, I want to thank you very much for being with us. Nir Rosen, independent journalist, his book is called In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq. He is just back from Beirut, Lebanon.

Link.

Reagan on Our Beloved Leader

"A moment I've been dreading. George brought his ne're-do-well son around this morning and asked me to find the kid a job. Not the political one who lives in Florida. The one who hangs around here all the time looking shiftless. This so-called kid is already almost 40 and has never had a real job. Maybe I'll call Kinsley over at The New Republic and see if they'll hire him as a contributing editor or something. That looks like easy work."

From the just published REAGAN DIARIES. The entry is dated May 17, 1986.

Via Rock and Rap Confidential.

Our Leaders' Intelligence on Iraq

Doesn't matter what any National Intelligence Estimate says, Our Beloved Leader will ignore it anyway, even when someone actually tells him what it says.

And an analysis of the report, possibly short enough for Our Leader to read or to have read to him, as the case may be, is here.

The Times Notes the Further Collapse of Modern Civilization, Western or Other

Four and a half years in Iraq, and this is what we have to show:

A stark assessment released today by the nation’s intelligence agencies depicts a paralyzed Iraqi government unable to take advantage of the security gains achieved by the thousands of extra American troops dispatched to the country this year.

The assessment, known as the National Intelligence Estimate, casts strong doubts on the viability of the Bush administration strategy in Iraq. It gives a dim prognosis on the likelihood that Iraqi politicians can heal deep sectarian rifts before next spring, when American military commanders have said that a crunch on available troops will require reducing the United States’ presence in Iraq.

[more]

And then there's this good news from Iraq and proof of what an absolute idiot and shameless liar Our Beloved leader is:

President Bush delivered a rousing defense of his Iraq policy on Wednesday, telling a group of veterans that “a free Iraq” is within reach and warning that if Americans succumb to “the allure of retreat,” they will witness death and suffering of the sort not seen since the Vietnam War.

“Then as now, people argued that the real problem was America’s presence and that if we would just withdraw, the killing would end,” Mr. Bush declared in a 45-minute speech before a Veterans of Foreign Wars convention here. He added, “The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be.”

In urging Americans to stay the course in Iraq, Mr. Bush is challenging the historical memory that the pullout from Vietnam had few negative repercussions for the United States and its allies.

[more]

Yeah, bailing on a hopelessly corrupt, inept government we enabled was such a disaster, China's a threat from sheer capital (the West pumped in) and Vietnam is still pretty much a backwater but a capitalist one. So much for the domino theory.

And yet another example of the innate corruption of the Republicans: just can't proceed with rebuilding at Ground Zero with any competence.

Our Periodic Micro$oft Bash

Crappy as most M$ products are, can this be for real?

More about Karl Rove's Piercing Stepfather

Why Xeni Jardin is my internet goddesses -- because she's (and BoingBoing) on this story. As I've said (or tried to), personal business is personal business -- until it has an impact far beyond the personal and, arguably in this case, into the commonweal of our nation. Again, what kind of impact did Lou Rove have on Karl? Was he the crucial factor in making Karl Rove what he is (or was, till recently)?

TRANSCRIPT OF JIM WARD INTERVIEW

AUGUST 19, 2007

[XENI JARDIN/BOINGBOING] This particular piece of the story is interesting for obvious reasons, but I think much of our audience is not familiar with exactly how this thing we take for granted now, body modification and piercing-- who some of the pioneers of that were, and… all of that points back to you in a big way.

[JIM WARD, FOUNDER, THE GAUNTLET] Well, I played a big part in that history, and I think -- primarily because I was the first person who began what became the piercing industry. There were a lot of people who were very interested in piercing, but they were very closeted about it. And even though they were telling their friends, it was very difficult because there was no place to get pierced, and no place you could really buy the right kind of jewelry.

[BOINGBOING] How did you first become involved in piercing? What was your first exposure to the experience?

[JIM WARD] Back in the late 1960s I was living in New York. I got involved with the leather scene in New York. It was something that's been stuck in my psyche for a long time. But I met a couple of guys who lived in Brooklyn Heights, where I did, and belonged to the New York Motorbike Club, a group of guys who were into leather and S&M. About that same time, I was reading a magazine article, and it talked about some man who had gone on a sea voyage. And when he had gotten back from his voyage, he decided to get his ears pierced to mark that occasion which is a Naval tradition as I understand it. It just -- this compulsion to have my ears pierced surfaced, and I got one of my buddies from the New York Motorbike Club to pierce my ears for me.

Not long after that, since late puberty, I'd discovered that nipple play was a very erotic thing. So about this same time, this fantasy sort of materialized of wanting to pierce my nipples. And finally I did. At that time, I knew no one who had ever done it, never heard of it, never seen it. And ironically, not too long after that some friends and I went to one of the leather bars in the Village. And lo and behold, there was a guy at the bar with no shirt on with beautiful gold rings in his nipples. That would have been about 1968, and that was kind of how I got into it.

[BOINGBOING] Now, take us forward from there to when you opened your shop, The Gauntlet, in West Hollywood, in 1975. That's often referred to as the birthplace of the modern piercing movement.

[JIM WARD] That's true, it was. I moved to LA in 1973. And one of those kinds of twists of fate kind of happened. I had a friend who had moved to LA not that long before me, and he had gotten a job as a bus driver. He drove back and forth to downtown, and one day he picked a guy up on his bus, and they got to chatting, and got acquainted, and it became a regular thing. This guy whose name was Tom would get on the bus, and chat. One day while they were visiting, another guy got on the bus who had a pierced ear, and they got to talking about piercing and my friend the bus driver said, "I have a friend who has pierced nipples," and Tom said, "Oh, I'd really like to meet him." Turned out that Tom was somebody who was very interested in body piercing and was very interested in it, and knew a number of people who were very involved in it including Fakir [Musafar], and he also knew a man named Doug Molloy, which was kind of a "nom de kink," as my friend termed it. "Doug" was a name that was used by this very wealthy Hollywood businessman, and we got to be good friends [Ed. Note: Doug Malloy was the pseudonym of Richard Simonton, an executive at Muzak Corporation].

And then, I was dating a guy not long after who wanted me to pierce his nipples. And I called up Doug and said, some of the techniques I used to pierce my own were pretty crude, I just used a wine bottle cork and a pushpin and a couple of cheap little earrings. Maybe you could share your technique with me, and tell me how to do it, tell me where you got the jewelry. And he said, I'm happy to share my technique wit hyou, tell you how to do it, but as far as jewelry's concerned, he said -- the only guy I know that makes it in San Diego and it's pretty expensive, lke $200 per ring, and this was in the early 1970s.

[BOINGBOING] So that was a lot of money back then.

[JIM WARD] That was a lot of money back then. And when I'd lived in New York, I'd taken several jewelrymaking classes, including one for professionals. I can buy the equipment and the gold wire and make these myself for a lot less than $200. So there was a little lapidary store in West Hollywood and I went there, and bought every thing I needed for about $45. And we made the arrangements for Doug to come over at the appropriate time and I pierced my boyfriend, and then Doug called me up one day and said, let's go have some lunch. So we went to a little restaurant and chatted, and he said -- you know, there is a market for this. And I think you should start a business. And that's how it all came into being.

[BOINGBOING] And what did you say? What was your reaction when Doug suggested turning this very personal experience into a business?

[JIM WARD] The investment was pretty small. Doug was even willing to lend me a little money to get me going. I could work out of my house in the beginning, and even continue with my other job as long as necessary. Seemed like a really great thing, something that I really enjoyed -- piercing, that is -- and it evolved from there.

[BOINGBOING] How old were you when you opened the shop?

[JIM WARD] The shop didn't open until 1978, but I started the business in 1975. I was born in 1941, so what would that have made me -- 34?

[BOINGBOING] So you opened the shop, and I imagine that back then, not a lot of people knew about this. There wasn't a big network of people, certainly not like there is today.

[JIM WARD] Well fortunately, Doug had traveled all over the world. He'd met people who were into it, he'd placed ads in fetish publications, trying to contact people who were interested in it. Over a period of years, he'd made contact with roughly a hundred people. So he gave me those names, that was really the core of where the business began. I made up a little catalog, and sent it to these people. Also, there was actually probably about 25 people in the LA area that he knew. So we started getting together once a month for what we called the "T&P Groups" -- tattoo and piercing. And we'd have a potluck or go out to a restaurant, and we'd end up back at my house, and anyone who wanted to get pierced -- I was happy to pierce them. And that was how the ball got rolling.

[BOINGBOING] And how did you come to meet Louis Rove?

[JIM WARD] Louie Rove was just one of those people -- I don't even remember how I met him, exactly, it may have been through The Pleasure Chest, which was -- which is -- an adult toy store in Los Angeles.

[BOINGBOING] Sure, they're still in business, over on the edge of West Hollywood.

[JIM WARD] I know that they referred people to me, that's one possibility. I also was doing some advertising in some of the local gay publications. There was a little newsmagazine that came out weekly called "Data-Boy," I ran an ad in that pretty much weekly, and it's possible that he saw that ad and responded to it.

[BOINGBOING] So he came in to the Gauntlet?

[JIM WARD] I think I would have-- yes, he came into the Gauntlet, I was probably in the store by that time. I opened the store in 1978, and I don't remember Louie being part of that at that time.

[BOINGBOING] So how did you become acquainted? He somehow became a part of the community, the circle of people around you, and what kind of man was he?

[JIM WARD] He was actually an incredibly nice man. He was genteel, a sweet nature. I don't think I ever heard him say an unkind word about anyone. He was probably an alcoholic. He drank way too much and smoked way too much. But he was never a mean drunk. If he'd had too much, he just said goodnight and went to bed. He was just really incredibly nice. He actually, a number of times through the years when I was strapped for money, he actually lent me a little money.

[BOINGBOING] And you mentioned [earlier via email to us] that he hosted some of these piercing parties for gay men at his home not far from LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

[JIM WARD] That's true.

[BOINGBOING] And you mentioned also that this was before he moved off to Palm Springs.

[JIM WARD] Yes, he moved off to Palm Springs after I moved to the Bay Area in '89. I don't remember how long after that he moved.

[BOINGBOING] Now, did you ever pierce Louie?

[JIM WARD] Oh, [laughter] many times. I pierced him -- I looked up the -- we published a magazine called Piercing Fans International Quarterly, PFIQ. He was the cover and the feature interview in one of the issues. In 1983.

[BOINGBOING] You mentioned that he used the nom de pierce, "Indy."

[JIM WARD] That's correct. And I referred back to the article -- at that time he had 37 piercings. And most of them were in his penis.

[BOINGBOING] That's a lot of hardware.

[JIM WARD] It is indeed, and it was all gold.

[BOINGBOING] It was gold -- was that unusual?

[JIM WARD] It was, because a lot of men preferred stainless steel. He had the money to buy it, and that's what he did.

[BOINGBOING] Why would someone prefer stainless steel? For economic reasons, comfort reasons?

[JIM WARD] A combination. Part of it was economy. The other thing is that a lot of gay men, particularly those in the S&M scene, came to prefer the white metal over the yellow metal.

[BOINGBOING] Just a different aesthetic.

[JIM WARD] Right.

[BOINGBOING] You mentioned also [via email to us] that you knew him as a retired geologist who had worked for the Getty Mining Company.

[JIM WARD] That is correct.

[BOINGBOING] What did you know of his family life, his personal life, before he came to LA?

[JIM WARD] Not that much. I knew he was divorced, I knew he had children. The only story I remember about his family was, I remember his telling me about when he came out to his mother. And this may be a little off color, but -- her response was, "You mean you put that dirty thing in your mouth?" So, for some reason that stuck in my mind. He was actually fairly private about his family and didn't go into a lot of detail.

[BOINGBOING] I don't know if you had a chance to read the essay on BMEzine, does any of that resound with the Louie Rove you knew?

[JIM WARD] Oh yes. It did indeed.

I spoke to him on the phone a few times after he moved to Palm Springs, and he told me about doing hospice work there, and told me about his lung problem, having to be on a respirator, on oxygen, that kind of thing. I did not see him, I have not been to Palm Springs in years, and unfortunately I never saw him again.

[BOINGBOING] The author of this essay identifies Louie Rove's son as being Karl Rove. Have you heard this before?

No, this is the first time I'd heard it. And then I did a Google search today, and apparently there's a biography of Karl Rove that came out not long ago…

[BOINGBOING] The Architect?

[JIM WARD] Yes.

[BOINGBOING] I hadn't read the book myself but saw those references online as well.

[JIM WARD] That was the first I'd heard about it.

[BOINGBOING] In that book, as I understand from excerpts on the web, the elder Mr. Rove is identified as having come out as a gay man, but none of those accounts ever related his role or experience in early body modification culture, so this is a pretty new thing.

[JIM WARD] [laughter]

[BOINGBOING] Not new for you, sir, but a new thing for the rest of the world to know about, with regard to this person. Well, so you opened The Gauntlet, the shop, in 1978. And as I understand it you left that business or somehow the business crumbled without you. Can you tell us what happened and how as I understand it, it sort of came back under your wing again?

[JIM WARD] In the late 90s the business got into financial trouble. A few years before I'd hired a general manager for the company because it had gotten pretty unwieldy. The main store was in West Hollywood, we had a branch in San Francisco, in New York, Seattle, and a franchise store in Paris, France.

I needed a general manager. And I hired a man who unfortunately, was probably embezzling money. The business went into serious financial decline. My health was in a bad state at that same time, which didn't help. And I got conned into turning controlling interest over to a man who was basically a con artist.

[BOINGBOING] When was that?

[JIM WARD] In 1997. He basically pumped as much money out of it as he could, drove it into bankruptcy, tried to play some games with the bankruptcy court. Because he'd filed a Chapter 7, which allows for some reorganization. He tried to play these games, and they said to heck with you, and converted it to a chapter 11, and closed the business. And when they did that of course, all the property came under the control of the bankruptcy court. I no longer owned it. They sat on that for some years and sold off the machinery, the inventory. They were going to sell off the intellectual property including the name, and the copyright, as a separate sale. They couldn't find anybody who was interested. Finally, two or three years ago, the trustee decided to put it up for bid on eBay.

[BOINGBOING] I'm looking at the gauntletenterprises.com website, the winning bid was $6,623.32, an anonymous bidder.

[JIM WARD] Well, he asked to remain anonymous at that time, but has since said it's not a problem to say who he was. Barry Blanchard, and he owns a body piercing and jewelry manufacturing company in Santa Cruz. He bought the intellectual property and then basically gave it back to me.

[BOINGBOING] Wow. What was that like, to regain control over that, to regain possession over something that had meant so much to you?

[JIM WARD] It really -- I cannot describe what a tremendous feeling it was. I felt that my child had died. By losing the intellectual property I didn't have anything to remember it by. I didn't have any mementos. So it felt like [re]gaining something that was a part of me. It also freed me -- I had wanted to write a book about the history of the modern body piercing movement. And I felt like if I didn't own the intellectual property and didn't have control over it, I didn't know what kind of problems I might run into in telling the story. Since that's come back, that gives me the ability to draw on some of that material in telling the story, the history of piercing.

[BOINGBOING] And are you working on that now?

[JIM WARD] Yes. I'm trying to find a literary agent. If you hear of anybody who's interested, let me know! (laughter)

[BOINGBOING] What's it like to look around you, all over the world now, and see what a huge part of popular culture body modification and piercing has become. Something that was so rare and foreign when you first encountered it in the late 1960s. What's that like?

[JIM WARD] I have very mixed feelings about it. Because it's like a child growing up and taking on its own personality. When I started the business, I saw body piercing as a means of erotic enhancement. It has long since gone far beyond that. Where that is definitely a secondary or tertiary interest for people. Now, it's so much more about the aesthetic, making a social statement, rebellion, a lot of things -- but the erotic enhancement aspect is down on the list. I wish that this were more a part of it these days, but I have to be realistic, it's not. And I'm honored that I did create something that captured the imagination of so many people and has enriched their lives. Constantly people tell me, you made a big difference in my life, and that is a really wonderful feeling. The only downside is, it no longer supports me. (laughter) But that's life.

[BOINGBOING] And the Gauntlet brand and the goings on around that are now managed by both you and your life partner Drew Ward.

[JIM WARD] That's correct.

[BOINGBOING] One of our readers who read the BMEzine essay about Louie Rove wrote in to say they felt it was sort of ironic, or strange to think that this man's son is credited with being the architect of so many policies that would limit the lifestyle freedoms of gay men who want to be committed to each other formally. And I wonder if you have any thoughts on that? It's kind of interesting that with your life path, and the fact that you have a long-term, committed relationship with someone you love very much, there's this odd wrinkle in history you're a part of there.

[JIM WARD] It's sort of difficult. In families -- you can always have rotten children come out of the best families. There's such incongruity between Louie, and the outgoing warm human being that he was, and this architect of evil as I see him, that Karl Rove is. I mean the disparity is just mind-boggling. I'm incredulous.

[BOINGBOING] So what's next for you now? The book is what you're developing then, right now?

[JIM WARD] Yes.

[BOINGBOING] And I was just reading online that you and Drew are thinking of republishing some back issues of Piercing Fans International Quarterly, PFIQ -- doing a new edition of the publication?

[JIM WARD] I don’t' think we'll ever bring the magazine back. You know, as an ongoing thing. We've talked about the possibility of reprinting back issues, that remains a possibility. But I have to find out about the legalities of issuing them, and I also want to be able to draw on that material for the book and I don't know if it's reprinted, you know -- what copyright issues might arise. So I'm just taking it one day at a time.

[BOINGBOING] Well, I for one very much look forward to reading the book. That's going to be a fascinating account of history. I can't imagine anyone more qualified to tell that story.

[JIM WARD] Well, (laughter) I don't think anybody can, because a lot of those people, unfortunately, are dead. People who were around at that time, there aren't that many oldtimers around. And being one of the key players I can tell things nobody else can.

[BOINGBOING] If there's one thing you'd like people to know about who Louie Rove the individual was, what would that be?

[JIM WARD] He was a man who was not afraid to be himself. He realized that he was a gay man. He ended a marriage that was a lie. He lived openly as a gay man. He was very true to himself.

[BOINGBOING] And years later, here we are thirty years after you started the Gauntlet, what would you like people to know about that time that you think is missing from public awareness?

[JIM WARD] I suspect that a lot of people don't realize there is a history. Especially young people, they just think it's something that's always been there. And they don't realize unless they do some research, that there is some history. Before that, this was the world of hardcore fetishists who were doing it in secrecy in the closet. They don't know how far they've come.

[BOINGBOING] It's not like there were websites or messageboards back then, huh.

[JIM WARD] There was no internet then.

[BOINGBOING] No real ways for people to connect around those kinds of lifestyles that were frowned upon at the time.

[JIM WARD] It's very difficult. You could put ads in fetish or gay publications. When we published PFIQ, for many years we included a classified ads section, a separate piece of paper stuck into the magazine, and sent only to subscribers. That was one of the reason we started PFIQ, so people who were interested in piercing could meet one another. It was very hard in those days.

[BOINGBOING] A lot has changed since then. I wonder how you feel about the fact that the internet is just this -- instant, pretty much free way for people to connect with an infinite number of others who are into body modification around the world.

[JIM WARD] Like everything, it's a mixed blessing. You never know somebody until you actually meet them face to face. And there are plenty of kooks in the world regardless of what they're doing, whether it's piercing, or you're a banker, a lawyer, whatever. You can have the most bland, conservative lifestyle, and you can still be very strange.

[BOINGBOING] You never know, huh.

[JIM WARD] You don't.

Link.

Further Debasement of elections inhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif Our Great Democracy

Really, one kind of wonders what kind of scumbag sees easily corruptible mechanisms as any sort of solution to anything but corruption in kickbacks and rigging elections more easily....

The end of the secret ballot:

Ohio's method of conducting elections with electronic voting machines appears to have created a true privacy nightmare for state residents: revealing who voted for which candidates.

Two Ohio activists have discovered that e-voting machines made by Election Systems and Software and used across the country produce time-stamped paper trails that permit the reconstruction of an election's results--including allowing voter names to be matched to their actual votes.

Making a secret ballot less secret, of course, could permit vote selling and allow interest groups or family members to exert undue pressure on Ohio residents to vote a certain way. It's an especially pointed concern in Ohio, a traditional swing state in presidential elections that awarded George Bush a narrow victory over John Kerry three years ago.

Ohio law permits anyone to walk into a county election office and obtain two crucial documents: a list of voters in the order they voted, and a time-stamped list of the actual votes. "We simply take the two pieces of paper together, merge them, and then we have which voter voted and in which way," said James Moyer, a longtime privacy activist and poll worker who lives in Columbus, Ohio.

Once the two documents are merged, it's easy enough to say that the first voter who signed in is very likely going to be responsible for the first vote cast, and so on.

"I think it's a serious compromise," said David Dill, a Stanford University computer science professor who has followed electronic voting issues closely. "We have a system that's very much based on secret ballots. If you have something where voters are involuntarily revealing their votes, it's a very bad practice."

Moyer and fellow activist Jim Cropcho tested this by dropping by the election office of Delaware County, about 20 miles north of Columbus, and reviewing the results for a May 2006 vote to extend a property tax to fund mental retardation services (PDF). Their results indicate who voted "yes" and who voted "no"--and show that local couples (the Bennets, for instance) didn't always see eye-to-eye on the tax.

Patrick Gallaway, communications director for Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, said on Friday that his boss had already been planning to begin a "comprehensive" review of e-voting machines as part of a campaign pledge she made before taking office in January. He said the review now is likely to include a look at the ES&S voter privacy concern as well.

ES&S machines are used in about 38 states, according to the Election Reform Information Project, created by the Pew Center on the States. Of those states, Arkanasas, Iowa, North Carolina, Ohio, and West Virginia are among those using ES&S iVotronic machines with paper audit trails.

Other suppliers of electronic voting machines say they do not include time stamps in their products that provide voter-verified paper audit trails. Sequoia Voting Systems and Hart Intercivic both said they don't. A spokesman for Diebold Election Systems (now Premier Election Solutions), said they don't for security and privacy reasons: "We're very sensitive to the integrity of the process."

An ES&S spokeswoman at the Fleishman-Hillard public relations firm downplayed concerns about vote linking. "It's very difficult to make a direct correlation between the order of the sign-in and the timestamp in the unit," said Jill Friedman-Wilson. (ES&S iVotronic machines are used in 10 Ohio counties, mostly in the center of the state, according to a map on the BlackBoxVoting.org watchdog site.)

"That is so fatally flawed," Friedman-Wilson said about Moyer's and Cropcho's analysis. "It doesn't take into consideration any of the times that there would be interaction with a voter and a poll worker before the ballot is activated." As for the interaction of Ohio open records law with ES&S logs, she said that "it is most appropriate that the secretary of state's office and others who are responsible for carrying out elections respond to questions regarding Ohio election law and procedure."

Timestamps + Ohio law = trouble

One explanation is ES&S had never expected that the paper with the time stamps, known as a voter verified paper audit trail, or VVPAT, would be made public under state open records laws.

A report evaluating ES&S security prepared by Compuware auditors two years for the Ohio secretary of state--marked "Confidential" but available on the Internet (PDF)--does warn about keeping electronic time stamps. It says that the electronic representation of votes, called the Cast Vote Records, "should not have time stamp associated with it" and must be randomized to protect privacy.

But the auditors viewed timestamps on the physical printout, called the audit log, as needed to detect "tampering" with the ES&S iVotronic hardware. "All actions to the iVotronic are recorded in the audit log with a time stamp," the report said. "This includes opening and closing the polls, voting, inserting invalid voting cards, loss of power, and supervisor access."

David Wagner, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, said electronic storage of votes in the order that voters cast them is a recurring problem with e-voting machines.

"This summer I learned that Diebold's AV-TSX touchscreen voting machine stores a time stamp showing the time which each vote was cast--down to the millisecond--along with the electronic record of that vote," Wagner said in an e-mail message. "In particular, we discovered this as part of the California top-to-bottom review and reported it in our public report on the Diebold voting system. However, I had no idea that this kind of information was available to the public as a public record."

The July 20 report on Diebold (PDF), written by Wagner and five Princeton University researchers for the California secretary of state, cites the electronic time stamp as a voting privacy concern. "If the time when each voter checks in is recorded in the poll log book, an attacker with access to the log book could correlate this data with the timestamps to determine how voters voted," the report says. "Alternatively, observers in the polling place could note the time when target voters cast their votes and find the corresponding vote records in the ballot results file."

Ohio law allows just this. Section 3501.13 of state law says "the records of the board and papers and books filed in its office are public records and open to inspection." Anyone who interferes with the public's right to inspect the records, in fact, is guilty of a misdemeanor.

Of course, the correlation may not be perfect. If Voter No. 1 signs in but gives his space in line to Voter No. 2 who's in a hurry, a reconstruction of the votes based on public records will incorrectly identify their votes.

Having multiple machines and multiple lines can also create a randomization effect, but Moyer says that in his experience as a poll worker there's only one line that feeds into multiple machines. In addition, he says, poll workers log the voter into the ES&S iVotronic, which starts the time-stamped entries and means there's no additional randomization of voters taking different amounts of time to start the process.

A uniquely Ohio problem?

Even though other states do use the ES&S iVotronic paper trails, they don't necessarily make them available for public perusal.

Natasha Naragon, a spokeswoman for the Arkansas secretary of state, said she knew of no way to disable the time stamps on the voting machines' printed output. But, she said, "our law does not allow for public access to our voted ballots" and said they remain sealed unless there's a recount.

Iowa's procedures seem designed precisely to avoid the Ohio situation. "Iowa has an administrative rule, because the paper trail is in voter sequence, that prohibits providing to any of the bodies that have access to the paper rolls any information that would allow them to link individual ballots on paper roll to the voters," said Sandy Steinbach, the state's director of elections.

Computer scientists and security experts say restricting the public's access to e-voting paper trails by tinkering with open records laws is insufficient--it doesn't protect against, for instance, an insider perusing the ballots and reconstructing them.

They do say paper trails are necessary to provide a physical check on what could be a buggy or maliciously programmed machine. But they offer three suggestions: deleting the time stamp, not keeping a list showing in which order people vote, and adding a paper slicer and shuffler to randomize how the physical audit trail is recorded.

Lorrie Cranor, director of the Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University, says that "you need to have mixing either in the recording of the orders of the voters or the votes, or preferably both."

"Audit trails are really important, but so is privacy," she said. "Many of the vendors of (e-voting machines) have actually put ID numbers on the paper records, which also could be used to reconstruct which voter is associated with a vote."

Moyer and Cropcho have posted a summary of their findings on their Web site, ThePublicBallot.org.

For its part, ES&S claims that printing out time stamps is recommended by standards adopted in 2002 by the Federal Election Commission.

ES&S spokeswoman Friedman-Wilson pointed to two sections of the standards, one of which says "all audit record entries shall include the time-and-date stamp." The other says error messages, critical system status messages, and a record of a voter "activating and casting each ballot" should be part of the audit log. (It does not, however, explicitly mandate that the outcome of the vote be printed.)

"Because the voter verifiable paper audit trail is one element of the audit function of a voting unit, one could interpret these guidelines as requiring the time stamp have citations within the guidelines," Friedman-Wilson said in an e-mail message.

Johnnie McLean, the deputy director of the North Carolina Board of Elections, said: "Our public records laws don't include that paper record. A voted ballot is considered confidential." In West Virginia, secretary of state spokesman Ben Beakes said: "There would be no way to match the time with the voter because in our poll book system, all you would find is an alphabetical list of the people they voted, not the time they came into the polling place."

Ohio, by contrast, may be unique. "It's my understanding from our legal staff that a public document consists of anything that is in the public domain," said Gallaway, the secretary of state's communications director. "I think that both of those (the time-ordered poll books and the time-stamped paper trail) would be considered that."

That has left computer scientists, already alarmed about the security of e-voting machines, dismayed at the interaction between time stamps and Ohio laws. "Security and privacy and the integrity of the voting system depend not only on the technology, but also on the procedures and the combination of the two," said Stanford's Dill. "This is a case where the combination of technology and procedures are working together to create a privacy threat."

Onee more time (in case you missed it); it's not only Diebold:

ES&S to be Rebuked, Fined and Possibly Banned in CA?
By Kim Zetter August 21, 2007 | 3:12:02 PMCategories: E-Voting, Election '08

California announced today that it plans to hold an administrative hearing on September 20th to discuss the fate of Election Systems & Software for violating state election codes. ES&S, the top voting machine company in the country, is being accused of selling at least five CA counties a version of its AutoMark ballot marking system that hadn't yet been tested or certified for use in the state or the country.

ES&S apparently sold at least about 1,000 uncertified machines to San Francisco, Marin, Colusa, Solano and Merced counties. (The number of uncertified machines delivered to California was supplied by ES&S to the state; CA officials have yet to conduct their own inventory to determine if more machines are involved.)

Per CA law, ES&S could be fined $10,000 per uncertified voting system unit (or $9.72 million) and be required to give a complete refund to counties of all money spent on the machines -- the latter would amount to about $5 million.

Additionally, ES&S could be barred from doing any business in the state for between 1 and 3 years, which would impact more than just the five counties mentioned -- potentially affecting more than 14 counties that use ES&S machines, including Los Angeles County.

The issue raises questions about how many other uncertified AutoMarks the company may have sold to other states.

ES&S did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.

The AutoMark A100 was certified for use in California in August 2005. However, in 2006, ES&S, by its own admission, sold about 1,000 units of its subsequent AutoMark model -- the A200 version -- to five CA counties months before the system passed federal qualification testing in August 2006. Voting machines generally undergo two stages of testing and certification, first by independent testing labs overseen by the federal government and then by the states themselves. But according to secretary of state spokeswoman Nicole Winger ES&S still has not submitted the A200 system to the state to examine and certify.

Winger also says that the A200 machines had stickers on them (see photo below) that identified them as having passed federal qualification testing, when they hadn't yet passed that testing. Winger says that the qualification stickers that were placed on the A200 machines were the stickers that are supposed to apply only to A100 machines. Winger says it's possible that the stickers were applied in error. But if ES&S deliberately placed the stickers on the machines it could suggest a deliberate attempt on the part of the company to deceive California election officials.

"We are in the early stages of learning about the facts," Winger told me. "We don't know who would have applied the A100 stickers to uncertified equipment."

Winger said the differences between the A100 and A200 systems are significant and easily identified just through visual inspection (see the photos above at right). The size of the motherboard and the types of wiring inside the machines are just two examples of the differences.

"Those are the first things on visual inspection that even a computer novice would notice," Winger says.

ES&S is not the first voting machine company to have sold uncertified equipment in CA. In 2003, the state discovered that Diebold Election Systems had installed uncertified software in machines in 17 counties. (UPDATE: Joseph Hall at UC Berkeley reminds me that Diebold wasn't the only company that had uncertified software running in CA counties in 2003. A subsequent review of all election software in the state at that time found that eight counties were using versions of ES&S software that had not been federally qualified or state certified. Other counties were also found to be using uncertified software made by vendors other than ES&S and Diebold.)

Stephen Weir, the clerk for Contra Costa County, which has 762 AutoMark units as part of a $14 million contract with ES&S, supports Bowen's decision to punish ES&S for violating state laws -- although his county isn't among those that received uncertified equipment.

"If a vendor is using equipment in California that is not certified, they need to get busted," he told me. "If in fact (Bowen has) found equipment that was not ceritifed, that's a violation of not just the trust that a vendor has with election officials and the state, that's a violation of law."

The AutoMark is a ballot marking device that is a hybrid between a touch-screen machine and an optical-scan unit. Voters insert a full-size paper ballot into the system and make their selections on a touch-screen. The machine marks their selections on the ballot before returning the ballot to voters. The ballot is then passed through an optical scanner and tabulated. The machine has been touted as an answer to both the accessibility issues involving disabled voters and the verification issues around paperless touch-screen machines since the machines include audio for blind voters and use a full-size paper ballot that voters can verify before submitting it to be scanned and tabulated.

ES&S has been the focus of much attention in recent months. Last week Dan Rather Reports disclosed that the company was assembling its touchscreen machines in a sweatshop factory in Manila, the Philippines. The company's touch-screen machines are also at the core of a disputed election in Sarasota, Florida.

The Problem with Mainstream Journalism

An allegedly legitimate newspaper has no problem printing this (and I refused to show the image, it's that offensive). Oops, there go another couple of readers and the readership continues to shrink....

Definition of an Idiot: An Enabler who has Seen the Light of Truth too Late

A bigoted bias: A survivor of the Soviet Union knows nothing about democracy and the West; they have zero perspective and therefore an absolutely worthless opinion.

And here's today's exhibit in support.

Cutting Interest Rates for Big Lenders Helps the Sub-Prime Impoverished

Wal-Mart CEO H. Lee Scott Jr. says customers are "running out of money."

Earlier this week, consumer juggernauts Home Depot and Wal-Mart reported softer than expected earnings.

Penned the New York Times, "the sober forecasts reverberated across Wall Street, sending the Dow Jones industrial average and the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index down by nearly 2 percent, with the Dow dropping more than 200 points. Shares of both Wal-Mart and Home Depot fell around 5 percent.

"Economists said the sluggish performance of the chains — Wal-Mart missed its profit forecast and Home Depot’s earnings dropped — could signal broader troubles in the economy."

Buried in the article was a sobering remark indeed: “Many customers are running out of money at the end of the month,” said H. Lee Scott Jr., the chief executive of Wal-Mart.

Link and more.

Incredible Underreported News Story?? Another Advancement for the World's Greatest Health System

Is it only me or is this unbelievable? Poor person goes to the hospital, gets sicker because of a screw-up by the hospital, requiring further, additional care -- and Medicare refuses to pay for that extra care?

There's not something wrong with that??

The story is here.

Our Beloved Leader, Our Beloved Loser

Our Beloved Leader is sort of reminiscent of the denouncement of my, like, favorite comic book story ever, "Superduperman", from Mad comics: No matter how much power a creep has, he's still a creep.

Our closest ally publishes this:

Rove is leaving because there is nothing more for him to do; Bush is letting him go because he no longer has any use for him. His departure effectively marks the end of the Bush presidency - from hereon in Bush's tenure is about keeping the troops in Iraq and as many of his administration out of handcuffs as possible. Last week Fox News asked the neocon commentator Charles Krauthammer how much time Bush had to promote his agenda. "None," said Krauthammer. "It's over. There is no agenda."

But while the left loves to revel in Bush's woes, it invariably revels in the wrong woes. Bush's problem is not that he has failed on our terms - humanism, equality, peace and democracy - but that he has failed on his own.

True, his low approval ratings reveal a president approaching Nixonian lows. But then, unlike Nixon, Bush has never craved popularity. He pushed through most of his most pernicious legislation after having lost the popular vote in 2000. This is a man who understood 51% of the vote in 2004 as an overwhelming mandate. "I'll reach out to everyone who shares our goals," Bush said. "I earned capital in the campaign, political capital. And now I intend to spend it. It is my style."

True, too, that the Iraq war is going badly. But then it has never been going well, and that has never seemed to bother him either. He has described himself as "the decider", but never "the contemplator". This too is his style.

In any case the Bush agenda was always more far-reaching than anything that can be accounted for by mere polls, war, or the loss of human life. The ultimate aim of his presidency was to realign American politics to cement a conservative electoral majority for a generation. The cornerstone of his domestic agenda was to build on the Republicans' traditional base of evangelists, southerners, white men and the wealthy, by winning over Catholics, married white women and a sizable minority of Latinos with a mixture of policies and pronouncements on immigration, homophobia, abortion and social security.

Bush did not create the partisan split in America; he inherited it, just as Al Gore would have if he had won the supreme court case in 2000. But while the split was broad (the difference was less than 5% in 13 states from New Mexico to New Hampshire), it was Bush who made it deep and rancorous.

For unlike Thatcher or Reagan he sought to achieve his ends not by exploiting division in order to forge a new, more rightwing consensus but rather to exploit new divisions in order to crush a growing consensus. The majority of the country was, for example, pro-choice and in favour of granting equal rights to gay couples in almost all areas. So the Bush administration chose to leverage gay marriage and late-term abortion - two issues that could act as a wedge - to rally his base. Crude in execution and majoritarian in impulse, it sought not to win over new converts but simply to mobilise dormant constituencies. His legacy will be rightwing policies - but not a more rightwing political culture.

That his agenda should have failed so completely should come as no surprise. The project was always, at root, a faith-based initiative. Following the Republican congressional victory in 2002 Rove was asked to comment on the fact that the nation seemed evenly divided between Republicans and Democrats. "Something else is going on out there," he said. "Something else more fundamental ... But we will only know it retrospectively. In two years, or four years or six years, [we may] look back and say the dam began to break in 2002."

With no discernible material basis on which to build, this new majority at home and new world order abroad had to be fashioned from whole cloth. A Bush aide once ridiculed a New York Times reporter for belonging to "the reality-based community", which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality". "That's not the way the world really works any more," he said. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

So here we are studying. The coalition crumbled. In 2006 Catholics backed the Democrats; white women broke even. According to a Wall Street Journal poll, Americans would prefer the next president to be a Democrat by 52% to 31%. Meanwhile, the presumptive standard bearer for this new majority is treated like a pariah. As the Republican hopeful Mitt Romney pressed flesh in a restaurant in Manchester, New Hampshire, a few weeks ago, Muriel Allard said: "We need someone like him. They don't care about us over there." At a town hall meeting a couple of hours away in Keene, another Republican contender, John McCain, was asked last month if it wasn't time to put a "warrior in chief" in the White House rather than these "draft dodgers". Bush's name never came up. "Friends who were obnoxious in their praise for him just don't mention him any more," says Rick Holmes from Derry. "He's like the embarrassing uncle you just don't want to talk about."

A sense of doom among Republicans is palpable. A growing number of Republican congressmen - most recently the former house speaker Dennis Hastert - have announced they are to retire, or are considering it. "Democrats will win the White House [and] hold their majority in the house and in the Senate in 2008," the retiring congressman Ray Lahood told the New York Times.

There is even talk that Republicans might not invite Bush to their convention. "If they're smart, no," the Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio told Newsweek. "Especially if things don't change in Iraq, we'll have the problem the Democrats had in 1968 with Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam. The question becomes: where do we hide the president?"

Bush could run, but he can't now hide. Rove showed Bush how to win elections, but he couldn't show him how to govern. For the next year and a half he may need more than a feather pillow to get him to sleep.

Quote of the Day

It ain't all bad news. That just lies from the liberal media.

Another area in which Our Leaders are in fact succeeding with their Iraq fandango:

Maj. J. DeLaRosa, a media affairs officer for the Marines at the Pentagon, couldn't believe Reed received only the certificate.

"That's unacceptable. 'Out of stock'? That's like saying, 'We're out of ammo.' That's like saying 'The Marines are going to close tomorrow.' It just seems a bit weird," DeLaRosa said. "There have been a lot of guys wounded, but not to the point that we're out of medals."

Link.

Proof that the Surge is Working

All we have to do is keep surging indefinitely until the Iraqis decide to do their own work themselves instead of letting us serve them and die for them because of our gratuitous destabilization of their nation.

But Our Leaders' surge is clearly working -- and succeeding.

Two senators whose foreign policy bona fides carry significant weight with their colleagues are back from a fact-finding trip to Iraq, and the facts they've found won't come as a surprise: The "surge" is creating some "breathing room" for Iraqi politicians, but the politicians aren't doing much with the air they've been given.

Link.

Saving the Rich from Their Own Bad Investments by Making the Less Weel Off Pay and Pay and Pay....

Well, such has it always been and Our Leaders are the last people to break that chain....

Two years ago, William Stout lost his home in Allentown, Pa., to foreclosure when he could no longer make the payments on his $106,000 mortgage. Wells Fargo offered the two-bedroom house for sale on the courthouse steps. No bidders came forward. So Wells Fargo bought it for $1, county records show.

Despite the setback, Mr. Stout was relieved that his debt was wiped clean and he could make a new start. He married and moved in with his wife, Denise.

But on July 9, they received a bill from the Internal Revenue Service for $34,603 in back taxes. The letter explained that the debt canceled by Wells Fargo upon foreclosure was subject to income taxes, as well as penalties and late fees. The couple had a month to challenge the charges.

For those who struggle to pay their bills, who watch their housing payments rise out of reach with their adjustable-rate mortgages, who lose a job or who fall victim to illness, losing one’s home can feel like hitting bottom. But one more financial indignity may await as the fallout from the great housing boom ripples across the United States.

Link and more.

And Krugman:

On Friday, the Federal Reserve tried to quell this panic by announcing a surprise cut in the discount rate, the rate at which it lends money to banks. It remains to be seen whether the move will do the trick.

The problem, as many observers have noticed, is that the Fed’s move is largely symbolic. It makes more funds available to depository institutions, a k a old-fashioned banks — but old-fashioned banks aren’t where the crisis is centered. And the Fed doesn’t have any clear way to deal with bank runs on institutions that aren’t called banks.

Now, sometimes symbolic gestures are enough. The Fed’s surprise quarter-point interest rate cut in October 1998, at the height of the crisis caused by the implosion of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, was similarly a case of providing money where it wasn’t needed. Yet it helped restore calm to the markets, by conveying the sense that policy makers were on top of the situation.

Friday’s cut might do the same thing. But if it doesn’t, it’s not clear what comes next.

Whatever happens now, it’s hard to avoid the sense that the growing complexity of our financial system is making it increasingly prone to crises — crises that are beyond the ability of traditional policies to handle. Maybe we’ll make it through this crisis unscathed. But what about the next one, or the one after that?

And more Krugman:

Most of the proposals I've seen for dealing with the problems of subprime borrowers are of the locking-the-barn-door-after-the-horse-is-gone variety: they would curb abusive lending practices - which would have been very useful three years ago - but they wouldn't help much now. What we need at this point is a policy to deal with the consequences of the housing bust.

Consider a borrower who can't meet his or her mortgage payments and is facing foreclosure. In the past, as Gretchen Morgenson recently pointed out in The Times, the bank that made the loan would often have been willing to offer a workout, modifying the loan's terms to make it affordable, because what the borrower was able to pay would be worth more to the bank than its incurring the costs of foreclosure and trying to resell the home. That would have been especially likely in the face of a depressed housing market.

Today, however, the mortgage broker who made the loan is usually, as Ms. Morgenson says, "the first link in a financial merry-go-round." The mortgage was bundled with others and sold to investment banks, who in turn sliced and diced the claims to produce artificial assets that Moody's or Standard & Poor's were willing to classify as AAA. And the result is that there's nobody to deal with.

This looks to me like a clear case for government intervention: there's a serious market failure, and fixing that failure could greatly help thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of Americans. The federal government shouldn't be providing bailouts, but it should be helping to arrange workouts.

And we've done this sort of thing before - for third-world countries, not for U.S. citizens. The Latin American debt crisis of the 1980s was brought to an end by so-called Brady deals, in which creditors were corralled into reducing the countries' debt burdens to manageable levels. Both the debtors, who escaped the shadow of default, and the creditors, who got most of their money, benefited.

The mechanics of a domestic version would need a lot of work, from lawyers as well as financial experts. My guess is that it would involve federal agencies buying mortgages - not the securities conjured up from these mortgages, but the original loans - at a steep discount, then renegotiating the terms. But I'm happy to listen to better ideas.

The point, however, is that doing nothing isn't the only alternative to letting the parties who got us into this mess off the hook. Say no to bailouts - but let's help borrowers work things out.

I Swear, the Last Word about Rove, I Hope

An analysis of what Karl did other than being Bush's brain is here: lies and slime. But what else can you do even in a weakened democracy when one is pimping the permanent minority party? Like the party who thinks sub-prime borrowers should be thrown out on the streeets so the lenders don't have to suffer from the risks of capitalism?

Once More, Another Final Post about Rove

Actually, much of this is another dirty post and mostly about Rove's adoptive father who was... well, really into piercings.... More about Rove the father is here (well, it's Wikipedia, so who knows...).

And here's a little:

His father, who had just died, was gay. Louis Rove had been a prolific smoker and died of lung diseases but he had loved his son and was very proud of his achievements. Although he was not Karl's biological father, Louis was the only father he had ever known because Karl's mother Reba had divorced very early in her son's life. In an interview with Wayne Slater and myself after he had guided the first Bush victory, Rove emphasized that he did not consider Louis his stepfather. "I don't call him Louis," he explained. "He's my father, my adopted father."

Nonetheless, Rove was decidedly circumspect when we asked him questions about his family. Louis and Reba Rove's marriage fell apart in 1969 during Karl's senior year of high school in Utah. Rove told us it was somewhat of a mystery but his father came home Christmas Eve and then returned to Los Angeles where he had taken a job as a geologist with Getty Oil. The family was supposed to move to LA with Louis at the end of the year. "But for whatever reason, that didn't happen," Rove told us. "My mother, who was very good at explaining things without explaining them, said it was not going to happen."

Karl seems to have inherited this particular talent from his mother. What he told us was fundamentally true; what he didn't tell us was the most important part of the story. Louis Rove had informed his wife that he was gay and that he was coming out of the closet and wanted a divorce. After he retired from his job in LA, Louis Rove moved to Palm Springs and befriended other retired gay men. He drank and socialized at the Rainbow Cactus and the Martini Burger and became part of a group of gay men who referred to themselves as "The Old Farts Club." According to his close friend of many years, retired insurance executive Joseph Koons, Louis Rove was one of the best people he knew and that both Louis and his son Karl were comfortable with the father's sexual orientation. Although Karl lovingly accepted his father as a gay man and treated Louis' gay associates with respect, Louis Rove's death was a private matter. His friends knew nothing of a memorial service and no death notice was published in the Palm Springs newspaper.

More here. And here.

At this point, I suppose I should point out that the stepfather was gay isn't the point. K.R.'s attitude towards it e.g. a complete willingness to engage in gaybashing. Also, as a parent, that the dad engaged in what could be characterized as extreme sex is an issue of concern. I mean, query whether this was crucial in making Karl a little demented himself (I mean, in his reckless disrgard for truth and sanity -- "extreme sex" would be far less perverse than what Karl and his cohort's done to American.)

Frank Rich ends his Farewell to Rove column with this -- what Rove wrought:

* * Ryan Sager, writing in The New York Sun, who put it best: "The face of the Republican Party in Iowa is the face of a losing party, full of hatred toward immigrants, lust for government subsidies, and the demand that any Republican seeking the office of the presidency acknowledge that he's little more than Jesus Christ's running mate."

That face, at once contemptuous and greedy and self-righteous, is Karl Rove's face. Unless someone in his party rolls out a revolutionary new product, it is indelible enough to serve as the Republican brand for a generation.

What Rove and Company has Wrought, Lowering Political Discourse to the Level of Dementia

The Fox Business Journal reports:

As a presidential candidate, Democrat John Edwards has regularly attacked subprime lenders, particularly those that have filed foreclosure suits against victims of Hurricane Katrina. But as an investor, Mr. Edwards has ties to lenders foreclosing on Katrina victims.

The Wall Street Journal has identified 34 New Orleans homes whose owners have faced foreclosure suits from subprime-lending units of Fortress Investment Group LLC. Mr. Edwards has about $16 million invested in Fortress funds, according to a campaign aide who confirmed a more general Federal Election Commission report. Mr. Edwards worked for Fortress, a publicly held private-equity fund, from late 2005 through 2006.

Asked about the matter, Mr. Edwards yesterday pledged that he would personally provide financial assistance to New Orleanians who are facing foreclosure by Fortress-affiliated businesses or have lost their homes already. "I intend to help these people," the former North Carolina senator said.

This is were the Republican perversity begins: Edwards' passive investment or rather the investment of a hedge fund in which he's invested is bad. (He is allegedly having the fund in question get him out of the investment in question.) (The perversity was first mainstreamed by Lee Atwater, whose protege Rove was. Rove then amped it up greatly, relying overly on false smears of opposing candidates. Which gets to the real reason that there can never be a true Republican majority: Republican positions are just too alienating. The best the demented radicals can do is eke out enough votes to stay in power. Of course, having the current Supreme Court and Diebold on their side helps where they can't otherwise eke out an electoral win with Rovian tactics. And of course, Big Media helps to a point, maybe; although it "help" has actually resulted in audience loss so who knows if they are really of any help.)

And as the Journal admits up front, this investment is putting fewer than three dozen people at potential risk.

Yet the Journal and the rest of the radical nutjob coterie has no propblem with Dick Cheney directly benefitting from his Haliburton investment.

Nor do the wingnuts have any problem with Our Leaders' "solution" for the sub-prime crisis: Lower an interest rate instead of, oh, ensuring that the sub-prime borrowers can do work-outs and rescheduling of their debts:

No matter that through its open-market operations, the Fed had flooded the money markets so that fed funds traded consistently under the official 5¼% target rate, prompting some observers to conclude that a stealth easing move already had taken place. If so, the easing brought no comfort to those who needed it most, and merely stuffed the pockets of those too timorous to part with any cash.

***

* * Lending to the strapped borrowers through the discount window won't bail out hedge funds and other speculators, as would the much-desired cut in the fed-funds target.

Meanwhile, by reviving the discount-window facility, which had fallen into disuse in recent years, credit would be directed to borrowers who can't get it elsewhere. And those loans would come at a price -- 50 basis points above the funds rate target, against collateral that gets a commensurate haircut.

Link.