Rudy! The Scum He Is, The Scum He Surrounds Himself With

Let me elaborate on the head. In this era, in this particular cycle, where the GOP candidates (or "whackos") feel they cannot run against a historically inept administration, one cannot be guided at all by what a pol says.

So we have to look at their advisers for a clue.

The Nation:

In March 2001, as Dick Cheney assembled his secret energy task force, Haley Barbour, one of the most powerful Republican lobbyists in Washington and a former chair of the Republican National Committee, fired off a memo to the Vice President. "A moment of truth is arriving," Barbour wrote, "in the form of a decision whether this Administration's policy will be to regulate and/or tax CO2 as a pollutant." Barbour pointedly asked, "Do environmental initiatives, which would greatly exacerbate the energy problems, trump good energy policy, which the country has lacked for eight years?"

The memo bore the imprimatur of Barbour's lobbying firm, but the real work was being done by Bracewell & Patterson, a midsize Texas law firm with a client list as long as the plume from a smokestack. Bracewell would go on to become one of the key lobbying outfits on energy policy in the Bush II era. Its clients have included massive coal-burning power plants like the Atlanta-based Southern Company; more than 450 oil companies represented by the National Petrochemical and Refiners Association; and Texas heavy hitters like Enron, ChevronTexaco and Valero Energy. All these interests had a major stake in persuading George W. Bush to abandon his campaign pledge to regulate carbon dioxide, the leading source of greenhouse-gas emissions. Two weeks after receiving Barbour's memo, Bush reversed his position and decided against naming CO2 as a pollutant, leading to more than six years of inaction in combating global warming.

It was the first of many victories for Bracewell & Patterson. In the coming years the firm would persuade the Administration to exempt coal-burning power plants from new pollution controls, forestall plans to reduce mercury emissions and shield the makers of MTBE, a toxic gasoline additive that contaminates drinking water, from costly lawsuits.

In March 2005 Bracewell got its biggest boost yet. At a press conference at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York City, the firm unveiled a new partner: former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. It also unveiled a new name: Bracewell & Giuliani. It was a huge coup for the firm. "He's going to help expand Bracewell's reputation nationally and internationally," Bracewell lobbyist Scott Segal said at the time.

It was also a shrewd move for "America's mayor." Giuliani had already enjoyed a string of business successes following his term as mayor. He had launched the consulting firm Giuliani Partners shortly after 9/11, and he'd partnered with Ernst & Young to launch an investment bank, Giuliani Capital Advisors, which was sold in March to an Australian company for an undisclosed sum. Giuliani jet-setted around the globe in a Gulfstream, giving speeches at $100,000 a pop. His 2002 book Leadership sold more than a million copies.

A law firm would solidify Rudy's financial empire--but not just any firm would do. Partner Giuliani wanted to become President Giuliani. He needed money and, more important, political connections. Bracewell offered a gateway into the lavish world of Texas Republican fundraising and easy access to the same titans of industry who had helped make the Bush family rich and propelled W. into the White House. The former mayor of one of the bluest cities in the country had just inked a whole lot of red.

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By the time Giuliani joined Bracewell in 2005, the firm was regarded as "the most well-known face of aggressive energy-industry lobbying in DC," says John Walke, head of the clean air division at the Natural Resources Defense Council. The DC contingent has done little to tone down its advocacy since Rudy's arrival. In the wake of record oil industry profits, they lobbied against a tax on windfall revenue. At a recent EPA hearing in Philadelphia, physicians, state officials, environmentalists and even an asthmatic family testified about the need to reduce smog levels. But Holmstead, now Bracewell's star expert, brushed aside such concerns. "If you change the standard, it's not going to have any impact whatsoever," he said.

Rudy didn't come cheap. Bracewell paid Giuliani Partners $10 million for his services and Giuliani a base salary of $1 million a year, plus 7.5 percent of the firm's New York revenues. (Former New York City Mayor Ed Koch once said, "You can get rich, or you can get elected." Giuliani is trying to do both.) In return, Rudy performed a variety of tasks. He spearheaded the opening of the New York office, bringing over talent like Michael Hess, New York City's chief lawyer under Giuliani, and Marc Mukasey, the son of US Attorney General-designate Michael Mukasey, to head the firm's white-collar defense practice. In more than two years, the firm has grown to roughly forty lawyers, with annual revenues estimated at $27 million.

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Rudy was once widely considered one of the premier lawyers in the country. He was the youngest associate attorney general ever, under Ronald Reagan, and as district attorney in Manhattan he made a name for himself by prosecuting crooked congressmen, Wall Street schemers and mob leaders. Yet he's always had trouble balancing his law career with his politics. In 1989 Giuliani joined the New York firm of White & Case. The firm had a list of controversial clients, including the government of Panama, home to drug-dealing dictator Manuel Noriega; foreign banks that gave large loans to the apartheid regime in South Africa; and an Italian construction firm that helped build a chemical weapons plant in Libya.

When Giuliani launched a run for mayor that same year, he was blindsided by bad press. "White & Case represented all sorts of dictators and scumbags," says veteran political consultant Hank Sheinkopf. "Rudy could never understand why that would be a problem." Politicians of both parties called on Giuliani to release his client list. Billionaire businessman Ronald Lauder, who ran against Giuliani in the Republican primary, aired a television ad featuring side-by-side pictures of Giuliani and Noriega. Nelson Warfield, Lauder's spokesman at the time and a current adviser to presidential candidate Fred Thompson, sees parallels between then and now. "It was an issue for him in '89, and it's an issue for him in '07," Warfield says of Rudy's clients. (Thompson, it should be noted, has his own questions to answer about his lengthy career as a Washington lobbyist.)

The Giuliani campaign is anticipating such scrutiny. In a leaked campaign dossier obtained by the New York Daily News in January, the word "business" appeared at the top of a list of potential vulnerabilities, ahead of his ex-wife Donna Hanover. The concern was justified. After the 2004 election Giuliani saw the nomination for Homeland Security czar of a protégé, former New York City Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, crash and burn when the press uncovered Kerik's affairs, unpaid back taxes and ties to the mob. "Rudy will be held to a higher standard," predicts GOP strategist Tony Fabrizio. "This is stuff he did after becoming America's mayor."

Bracewell & Giuliani presents a host of potential sore spots, on the left and the right. Operatives from rival GOP campaigns were quick to exploit the fact that the firm represented Citgo, the state oil company of Venezuela, one of the current bêtes noires of the right wing. Bracewell helped Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. block "indecency" laws on television, thwarting a pet issue of Christian conservatives. The firm provided counsel to the defense fund of disgraced former House majority leader Tom DeLay--at the same time that it was lobbying DeLay and Congress to grant immunity to the makers of the toxic gasoline additive MTBE, which faces hundreds of lawsuits for contaminating drinking water. Clients abroad have included repressive regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Kazakhstan (Bracewell has two offices representing American oil companies in Kazakhstan; Rudy's Bracewell supporters recently held a campaign fundraiser there). A few years ago its biggest client was Enron.

Giuliani has accepted more money from the energy industry--$477,208 through the first half of 2007--than any other presidential candidate. These ties likely won't hurt him with GOP primary voters, who welcomed Bush and Cheney with open arms. But it could arouse the suspicions of moderate and independent voters in a general election, many of whom don't look forward to the idea of Halliburton clones dictating policy in the next White House.

Texas Loves Rudy

After joining Bracewell, Giuliani became a frequent visitor to Texas. He's raised nearly $4 million in the state, more than any other Republican, and as of August recruited thirty-seven of George W. Bush's Pioneers and Rangers (those who raised at least $100,000 and $200,000, respectively, for the Bush campaigns), second only to John McCain. Rudy became acquainted with Texas politics when he launched his aborted senatorial run against Hillary Clinton in 2000. Roy Bailey, a Dallas insurance mogul and former finance chair of the Texas Republican Party, helped him raise money for that race. They struck up a close friendship, and after 9/11 Giuliani told The American Lawyer magazine he "turned over" his postmayoral planning to Bailey, who became managing director of Giuliani Partners. At the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City, where Rudy's invocation of 9/11 took center stage, Bailey met Pat Oxford, managing partner of Bracewell & Patterson. Over coffee the next day, Bailey floated the idea of Giuliani joining Bracewell. They clicked, and soon the deal was done.

Oxford himself is a player in Texas Republican politics. He met George W. Bush in the 1970s, worked on his campaigns and became a Pioneer in 2000 for Bush/Cheney. Through Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, a law school classmate, Oxford met Karl Rove; they became "fast friends," Oxford told The American Lawyer. In 2000 Oxford formed the Mighty Texas Strike Force, dispatching volunteers from Texas to battleground states. During the 2000 recount in Florida, Oxford said he "ran Broward County" and managed the Bush/Cheney legal defense team, talking with Bush frequently in Texas. In 2004 his twenty-five-person "strike force" in Ohio became a source of contention when hotel workers in Columbus, according to a report compiled by the Democratic staff of the House Judiciary Committee, claimed that the strike team used "payphones to make intimidating calls to likely voters, targeting people recently in the prison system" and alleging that the FBI would send them back to jail if they voted.

Giuliani's business partners and Texas allies have come to play a prominent role in his presidential campaign. Oxford is the campaign's national chairman, marshaling operations and squiring Giuliani throughout the state. A fellow Houstonian, Jim Lee, a close ally of Governor Rick Perry and a Pioneer for Bush/Cheney in '04, is the campaign's new finance chief. The day-trading company Lee co-founded, Momentum Securities, was censured and fined $75,000 by the National Association of Security Dealers in 2001 for producing misleading advertising material, downplaying financial risks to investors and overstating its capital. After Lee raised $200,000 for Perry's re-election campaign, the governor appointed him last year to the board overseeing Texas's $96 billion public school employee pension fund.

Giuliani Partners's Roy Bailey introduced the candidate to GOP billionaires and major Bush supporters like T. Boone Pickens and Tom Hicks. Pickens got to know Rudy after dinner one night at Bailey's house. Hicks had committed to McCain's campaign, but after Bailey "went to see him and rib him about it," he changed his mind and became Giuliani's Texas chairman. The three hosted a fundraiser for Rudy last March in Dallas.

Pickens is a legendary corporate raider from West Texas who terrorized Wall Street by threatening to take over oil companies and grew filthy rich in the process. Since launching a hedge fund specializing in energy investments in 1996, Pickens has become even richer, making more than $1.5 billion in 2005. That same year he gave $165 million to Cowboy Golf, a small charity connected to his alma mater, Oklahoma State, and on whose board Pickens sits. Within an hour, the tax-deductible donation was invested back into the Pickens hedge fund, BP Capital. Critics who objected to the transaction, and Pickens's influence at OSU, began calling the school "Boone State."

More recently, Pickens has been prospecting in Texas's new oil: water. His company, Mesa Water, owns groundwater rights to 200,000 acres of land north of Amarillo (in Texas, unlike other Western states, groundwater is considered private by virtue of a "right to capture" law), which he's said he plans to sell to cities like El Paso, San Antonio and Dallas, potentially netting him $1 billion over the next thirty years. Pickens claims to be the "number-one steward of the land," but locals are wary of what Fortune magazine dubbed a Chinatown-esque scheme to divert water from the Panhandle, earning Pickens the status of "regional reprobate," as Salon put it. For a born-and-bred Texan, Pickens is more like Giuliani than you'd think, especially when it comes to his personal life: four wives, semi-estranged from his children, reviled in his hometown. His political profile is no less turbulent. When the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth needed seed money for an ad campaign smearing John Kerry's service record in Vietnam, Pickens ponied up an initial $500,000. He eventually gave $3 million to the group. Pickens has raised more than $500,000 for Giuliani, including $50,000 from employees of his hedge fund.

Tom Hicks isn't far behind Pickens financially, and his ties to the Bush family go even deeper. In 1994 under then-Governor Bush Hicks joined the University of Texas Board of Regents, one of the plushest appointments in the state, and was put in charge of investing the university's multibillion-dollar endowment. Hicks formed a private entity using UT money, called the University of Texas Investment Management Company, which invested millions with Bush family supporters and Hicks allies like The Carlyle Group, Bass Brothers of Fort Worth--who bailed out Bush's previous company, Harken Energy--and Dallas's Wyly family, all major patrons of the Bushes. News reports detailing the close family connections led to a major public controversy. Hicks stepped down at the end of his term, but the ties to Bush didn't end there. In 1998 Hicks bought the Texas Rangers for $250 million, three times what Bush and his partners paid for the team in 1989, and granted Bush six times his original share, making the failed businessman an overnight multimillionaire.

Hicks, who became vice chairman of the radio behemoth Clear Channel in 2000, helped Bush in whatever way he could. According to Salon, "Hicks announced on a conference call among Clear Channel's senior radio executives that the company was supporting Bush's presidential run, that everyone was encouraged to make donations, and that the legal department would be in contact with donors in order to maintain a proper roster." After 9/11 Clear Channel banned "potentially offensive" songs from its stations, and in the run-up to the war in Iraq, bankrolled supposedly grassroots pro-war "Rallies for America" across the country. The company gave nearly $470,000 to Republican candidates in 2006, roughly the same as in '04. Ironically, Hicks's investment fund sold its stake in Clear Channel last year to the private equity firm Bain Capital Partners--the longtime employer of Mitt Romney. Today, though, Hicks says, "I'm more closely aligned to Rudy than I am to Bush." As state chair for Giuliani, Hicks was given the task last January, according to the leaked strategy memo, of raising $30 million for the campaign in Texas, a figure that has thus far proven wildly optimistic.

And more from The Nation:

When the New York Daily News obtained a leaked 140-page strategy memo from the Giuliani campaign in January "one name," according to the article, appeared "throughout the document: Paul Singer, a discreet hedge-fund tycoon who has been described as the Republican George Soros." The Upper East Side billionaire and longtime contributor to Republican and conservative causes was asked by the campaign to raise cash from Wall Street, recruiting other big-money donors and even contacting 9/11 survivors and victims' family members to support Giuliani's bid for the Republican nomination.

Since then, Singer has become one of Giuliani's most important fundraisers, bundling more than $500,000 for the campaign. Singer and employees of his hedge fund, Elliott Associates, have chipped in an additional $168,000. The campaign frequently uses his private jet.

In late September Singer was once again in the news. Republicans in California with ties to the Giuliani campaign were pushing a ballot initiative that would award the state's electoral votes by Congressional district rather than winner-take-all, a move that could potentially throw a close election to a Republican. The group leading the drive was funded via a previously unknown organization in Missouri with exactly one donation of $175,000. When that outfit refused to divulge who made the contribution, the two GOP strategists in charge of the initiative quit in frustration. Eventually, as questions mounted, Singer admitted to being the sole contributor but claimed complete independence from the Giuliani campaign. Democratic lawyers in California believed otherwise, so they filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission alleging a Giuliani-connected "money laundering operation."

That Singer was at the center of the controversy should come as no surprise. In the 1990s Singer's hedge fund pioneered a shadowy, lucrative and often ruthless form of investing whose practitioners earned the not-so-generous moniker "vulture funds." Vulture funds--or "sovereign debt investors," as they prefer to call themselves--buy old defaulted debts, usually from the poorest countries in the world, and then drag the debtors into court, seeking a settlement far above what the funds originally paid for the debt. These are debts that are usually forgiven when the countries are granted relief by wealthy nations like the United States and multilateral institutions like the World Bank. An official at the Bank likens vulture fund activities to giving up your seat on a bus for an old lady, only to see a young college jock swipe it.

Large hedge funds like Singer's Elliott Associates often operate in secret, through shell companies in tax shelters like the Cayman Islands. Since the end of 2005, more than a third of the countries receiving debt relief have been targeted by at least thirty-eight hedge funds, which have gotten judgments in excess of $1 billion. This reverse Robin Hood scheme has drawn criticism around the globe, including from Nelson Mandela and British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

It all started in 1996, when Elliott paid $11 million for $20 million of debt, dating back to 1983, theoretically owed by the government of Peru. In 1989, then-US Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady had urged rich countries to forgive the debts of poor ones in order to spur economic growth and global development. Instead of settling with Peru, as its 180 other creditors did, Elliott took the government to court. "Pay us in full or be sued," Singer threatened.

A federal district court in New York initially ruled against Elliott, finding that the fund had purchased the debt "with the intent and purpose to sue" and "rejected each and every opportunity to participate in Peru's restructuring." Elliott appealed and won. Then the fund began working the political system in New York. With the help of a lobbying firm in Albany, Elliott, through a subsidiary, persuaded the New York legislature to change an obscure law governing compound interest, increasing Elliott's payout by $16 million, for a total, including interest, of $58 million. It was done so quietly that Peru's lawyers didn't find out until after the fact. A few years later the New York State Assembly eliminated another law that Peru had used to defend itself. Three months after the bill became law, Singer gave the lead sponsor, State Assembly Member Susan John, a $2,500 campaign donation.

Elliott's most recent target is the oil-rich but desperately poor West African nation of Congo, home to three civil wars since 1993, with 70 percent of the population below the poverty line. In the late 1990s Elliott, through a variety of shadowy subsidiaries, bought $100 million of defaulted Congolese debt for roughly 7 to 10 cents on the dollar, according to a legal brief filed by the Congolese government. A Cayman Islands-based entity called Kensington International went to court in London and received favorable judgments, ordering repayment of the debt plus interest. Then Kensington returned to court in London and sought to prevent Congo from repaying any other creditors until Kensington was paid. This time the judge balked, saying he didn't even know what Kensington International was and how much it had paid for the debts.

Only when Kensington sued Congo in New York under a RICO statute (which would triple a final judgment to $375 million), was it revealed that Kensington was a subsidiary of Singer's fund. Since then, Elliott/Kensington has pulled out all the stops. The fund retained as counsel Ted Olson, George W. Bush's initial choice to replace Alberto Gonzales as Attorney General. Kensington has filed at least fifteen separate lawsuits against Congo and its business partners, in places ranging from the British Virgin Islands to Hong Kong to the United States.

After members of the Congolese government amassed large hotel bills at a UN summit in New York, Kensington lobbied the World Bank to block scheduled debt relief for the country, according to two sources close to the Congolese government. The fund placed op-eds in influential newspapers, produced letters of support from members of Congress and even filed a lawsuit in Brussels against the Belgian government to confiscate a 10 million euro foreign aid payment from Belgium to Congo. (In a separate case against Argentina, Elliott has enlisted former top Clinton Administration officials to persuade the country to pay debts that the firm acquired for as little as 15 cents on the dollar.) "They're completely amoral," says David Skeel, a professor of corporate law at the University of Pennsylvania. "It's almost a matter of pride to them."

Elliott says this type of investing accounts for only 1 percent of its $7 billion hedge fund. But Singer is unapologetic about the hardball tactics he pioneered. "Every country has poverty, including the USA," he told The Nation via e-mail. "Our disputes have always been with sovereigns who can pay but refuse." He dismisses his critics as "debtors who attempt to curry populist favor by paying just what they feel like paying" and "ideologically driven people and groups who do not realize that capital goes where it is welcome."

Singer has never been shy about expressing his conservative views. He regularly espouses them in Elliott's newsletter to investors, warning against universal healthcare and an equitable tax rate for hedge funds and advocating nuclear power to fight global warming.

This summer, as part of a fundraising shakeup, Giuliani made Singer a senior policy adviser focusing on the Middle East, a plum spot for the billionaire, given his ties to neoconservative outfits like the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs. Indeed, in a newsletter last March, Singer added his name to the list of Giuliani advisers who have advocated bombing Iran. "We think that it is necessary to do so," he wrote, "and soon."

And a little more is here.

And from TalkingPointsMemo:

Rudy Giuliani has just announced a new raft of foreign policy advisors. And I guess the premise of the campaign is now that the Bush administration wasn't sufficiently riddled by neoconservative whackjobs.

Topping the list: Michael Rubin as Senior Iran and Turkey Advisor and Middle East Advisory Board Member.

I really don't know how to describe Rubin for those who aren't familiar with him. He worked at Doug Feith's Office of Special Plans. But that hardly does the matter justice -- rather like saying Dick Cheney was a supporter of the Iraq War. On the TPM Scale of Pure Neoconism (TM) Rubin gets well over 99%. Like the most interesting and frightening neos, Michael is that perfect mix of extreme factual knowledge and extreme lack of judgment, prone to wild-eyed theories and fantasies of various sorts but all in the end leading inexorably toward catastrophic policy moves for the United States.

You really might as well put Ahmed Chalabi as your top Mideast or Iran advisor.

And here's the legion of... whatever.... Scary:

Rudy Giuliani collects foreign policy advisers like some people collect foreign coins.

His campaign just announced eight more of them. In September, he rolled out seven new ones, in addition to the core crew organized by Charles Hill, Giuliani's Foreign Affairs ghost writer, which includes a ideologically diverse range of experts ranging from neo-conservatives like Norman Podhoretz to democracy-promotion skeptics like Martin Kramer.

The release with all the new additions is below:

Rudy Giuliani Announces Additional Foreign Policy Advisors
Dr. Ruth Wedgwood, Adm. Robert Natter, Other Experts Join Team Rudy

New York City - The Rudy Giuliani Presidential Committee today announced additional members of Mayor Giuliani's foreign policy team, including Dr. Ruth Wedgwood, an internationally-renowned legal and United Nations expert, as a member of the International Law and Organizations Advisory Board, and Adm. Robert Natter, Ret., as Senior Military Advisor.

"Mayor Giuliani is enormously bright, tough and prudent," said Wedgwood. "He knows how to defend what we value, including the freedom of America in the face of a dangerous foe. He drives for results, not rhetoric. His human qualities are not masked, and his leadership will be characterized by articulate explanation of what America stands for in the world."

Wedgwood and Natter are joined by several advisors who served in Iraq: John Agresto, Owen West, and Michael Rubin. Other additions to the foreign policy team members include Kori Schake, David Frum, and Thomas Joscelyn.

"I support Rudy Giuliani because I believe our country really needs the managerial competence and fiscal conservatism he demonstrated so ably as Mayor of New York," said Schake. "He's focused on the most important problems, takes responsibility for his choices, is tough enough to implement decisions, and never loses sight of the greater good. We will be well served to have Rudy Giuliani as President."

Giuliani Policy Director Bill Simon said: "I'm delighted that these outstanding individuals have joined the foreign policy team that is continuing to grow under the strong leadership of Charles Hill."

Mayor Giuliani's foreign policy team advises the Mayor on a foreign policy vision that advances the United States as a world leader: expanding America's involvement in the global economy, strengthening our reputation around the world, and keeping our country on offense in the Terrorists' War on Us.

About Mayor Giuliani's Foreign Policy Advisors:

Ruth Wedgwood, International Law and Organizations Advisory Board Member

Wedgwood is the Burling Professor of International Law and Diplomacy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, in Washington, D.C., where she also directs the International Law and Organizations program.

Wedgwood has a broad experience in international institutions. In 2002, she was elected to the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Previously, Dr. Wedgwood served as amicus curiae to the United Nations' International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, at the invitation of President Antonio Cassese, also serving as director of studies at The Hague Academy of International Law.

She is a member of the board of editors of the American Journal of International Law and was senior fellow and director of the Ford Foundation project on international law at the Council on Foreign Relations. Wedgwood has served on many advisory boards, including the Secretary of State's Advisory Committee on International Law, the CIA's Historical Review Panel, the Congress's Hart-Rudman Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board, and the U.S. delegations to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe and the Wehrkunde Security Conference.

Wedgwood is a graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, where she was executive editor of the Yale Law Journal and won the Peres Prize for finest writing. She was a law clerk to Judge Henry J. Friendly and a law clerk on the U.S. Supreme Court.

She served as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, with Rudolph Giuliani, where she investigated and tried complex criminal cases. Wedgwood has taught at the U.S. Naval War College as the Stockton Professor of International Law and as a visiting professor at the University of Paris. She was a Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 2006. She was also a professor on the Yale Law School faculty for over a decade and a fellow of Berkeley College. She is a member of the board of directors of Freedom House, which supports political freedom in the countries of the former Soviet bloc and the Middle East.

She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, the American Law Institute, the International Institute of Strategic Studies, and the San Remo Institute on Humanitarian Law. She is a former vice president and life member of the American Society of International Law and chaired the ASIL Task Force on Terrorism.

Wedgwood has been a frequent commentator on legal issues on National Public Radio, the Lehrer News Hour, BBC, MSNBC, and ABC News, and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and LA Times.

Robert Natter, Senior Military Advisor

Admiral Natter retired from the US Navy as a four star Admiral after serving as Commander of the US Atlantic Fleet and the first Commander of US Fleet Forces Command, responsible for the training and equipping of all world wide deploying US Navy forces. Following one year of reserve enlisted service and four years at the Naval Academy, he was graduated and commissioned an Ensign in 1967.

His service at sea included department head tours in a Costal Minesweeper and Frigate, and Executive Officer tours in two Amphibious Tank Landing Ships and a Spruance Destroyer. He was Officer-in-Charge of a Naval Special Warfare detachment in Vietnam and commanded USS CHANDLER (DDG 996), USS ANTIETAM (CG 54), and the United States SEVENTH Fleet before his assignment at Fleet Forces Command.

Shore assignments included Company Officer and later Flag Secretary to the Superintendent at the U.S. Naval Academy; Executive Assistant to the Director of Naval Warfare in the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations; staff member for the House Armed Services Committee of the 100th Congress of the United States; Executive Assistant to the Commander in Chief, U.S. Pacific Fleet, Executive Assistant to the Vice Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, during Desert Storm Operations in the Middle East; Assistant Chief of Naval Personnel for officer and enlisted personnel assignments; Chief of the Navy 's Legislative Affairs organization; and Director for Space, Information Warfare, Command and Control. He was also the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Plans, Policy and Operations.

Admiral Natter was a distinguished graduate of the U.S. Naval War College and has Masters Degrees in Business Management and International Relations. In May 2000, he was honored as the fifth recipient of the Naval War College 's annual Distinguished Graduate Leadership Award.

His personal decorations include the Silver Star Medal, four awards of the Distinguished Service Medal, Defense Superior Service Medal, five awards of the Legion of Merit, the Bronze Star Medal with Combat V, Purple Heart, two awards of the Meritorious Service Medal, the Navy Commendation Medal with Combat V, Navy Achievement Medal with Combat V, and various unit and campaign awards.

John Agresto, Iraqi Advisory Board Member

Agresto is the former president of St. John's College in Santa Fe, NM. A long-time educator and scholar in American law and government, Dr. Agresto spent time in Iraq after the fall of Saddam working to rebuild the Iraqi higher education system. After earning his doctorate from Cornell University, he taught at the University of Toronto, Kenyon College, the New School University, and Duke. He was both deputy and acting chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, appointed by Ronald Reagan. He is also the author of an analysis of the current situation in Iraq, Mugged by Reality. He and his wife currently reside in New Mexico.

Owen West, Iraq Advisory Board Member

Owen is a graduate of Harvard College and Stanford Business School. He served as a Marine infantry officer for six years before joining Goldman Sachs, where he is currently a Managing Director of Energy Trading. Owen has taken two leaves-of-absence from Goldman to fight with the Marines in Iraq, most recently leading a team of advisors living with an Iraqi infantry battalion. As an author and reporter, his novels and articles on military affairs have won several awards including the Boyd Literary Award for best military novel and the Marine Corps Essay Contest. A former heavyweight rower, he has completed 100-mile marathons, attempted Mount Everest and finished as high as 2nd in the Eco Challenge. Owen is a director of the Marine Corps Scholarship Foundation. He lives in New York City with his wife and two boys.

Michael Rubin, Senior Iran and Turkey Advisor and Middle East Advisory Board Member

Rubin is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Rubin is co-author of two books: Eternal Iran: Continuity and Chaos (Palgrave, 2005) and author Into the Shadows: Radical Vigilantes in Khatami's Iran (Washington Institute, 2001). A native of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Rubin earned a B.S. in Biology and a Ph.D. in History from Yale University. In 2002, the Council on Foreign Relations' International Affairs Fellowship placed Rubin on the Iran and Iraq desk at the Pentagon, from where he was seconded to Baghdad. Since 2005, Rubin has helped educate U.S. officers deploying to Iraq through the Naval Postgraduate School's Leadership Development & Education for Sustained Peace program.

Kori Schake, Senior Foreign Policy Advisor

Schake is a fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and holds the Distinguished Chair of International Security Studies at the U.S. Military Academy. She has just completed the book Managing American Hegemony: Essays on Power in a Time of Dominance. Other recent publications include: The Coming Crisis of High Expectations: Transatlantic Relations After the 2008 Elections (Centre for European Reform: October 2007), and "Dealing with a Nuclear Iran," (Policy Review, February/March 2007). She also runs the overarching issues team in the Project on National Security Reform, which aims to better structure, finance, staff, and train the U.S. government for contemporary security challenges.

Schake was the Director for Strategy and Requirements on the National Security Council, where her work focused on national security strategy, long-term defense planning, NATO adaptation, and management of coalitions with forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. She ran the interagency review of U.S. military bases around the world, which resulted in the most significant reposturing of U.S. forces since the Korean War.

Previous work includes six years in the Pentagon for both the Joint Staff and the Office of the Secretary of Defense and teaching in the faculties of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, the University of Maryland's School of Public Affairs, and the National Defense University.

David Frum, Senior Foreign Policy Advisor

Frum is the author of five books, including two New York Times bestsellers: The Right Man: The Surprise Presidency of George W. Bush (2003) and co-author with Richard Perle of An End To Evil: How To Win the War on Terror (2004). His sixth book, Comeback: Conservatism That Can Win Again, will be published later this year.

Frum is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and writes a daily column for National Review Online, plus weekly columns for Canada's National Post and Italy's Il Foglio. He has contributed frequently to the editorial pages of The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal and appears often on CNN, Fox News, and the BBC. Frum is a regular commentator on American Public Radio's "Marketplace" program.

Frum served as a speechwriter and special assistant to President George W. Bush.

Frum's first book, Dead Right, was described by William F. Buckley as "the most refreshing ideological experience in a generation," and by Frank Rich of the New York Times as "the smartest book written from the inside about the American conservative movement." In 1996, The Wall Street Journal acclaimed him as "one of the leading political commentators of his generation." In 2001, Judge Richard Posner's study of public intellectuals listed Frum as one of the 100 most influential minds in the United States.

Frum was born in Toronto, Canada in 1960. He received a simultaneous BA and MA in history from Yale in 1982. He was appointed a visiting lecturer in history at Yale in 1986; in 1987, he graduated cum laude from the Harvard Law School, where he served as president of the Federalist Society.

Thomas Joscelyn, Senior Terrorism Advisor

Joscelyn is a terrorism analyst, economist, and writer living in New York. Most of Joscelyn's research and writing has focused on how al Qaeda and its affiliates operate around the world. He is a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard and its online publications, the Daily Standard and Worldwide Standard. His work has also been published by National Review Online, the New York Post, and other media outlets. Joscelyn is the author of Iran's Proxy War Against America, a booklet published by the Claremont Institute that details Iran's decades-long sponsorship of America's terrorist enemies. Mr. Joscelyn makes regular appearances on radio programs around the country and has appeared on MSNBC.

In 2006 he was named one of the Claremont Institute's Lincoln Fellows. In addition to his life as a terrorism analyst, Mr. Joscelyn also manages economic research projects focused on antitrust, regulatory and securities issues for a prominent economic consulting firm. He holds a B.A. in Economics from the University of Chicago.

Hot Blackwater Psychokiller Action

Blimey! Me first embedded YouTube viddie. Viddie and hot shots of Blackwater-in-Action! Click + watch!

The Superior Insights And Knowledge Of Our Leaders

Okay, seven years in in running -- excuse me, having an involvement at the higher levels of foreign policy-making -- the administration's foreign policy, does this woman really first realize this crap now? When did anyone really believe Russia is a democracy or that its leaders want it to be a democracy? It certainly has done a fabulous job of creating a plutocracy.

I mean, on one hand, one hopes this is just some silly public pronouncement, a sending of a message, or maybe just a show for the base, as it were... I don't know....

The Russian government under Vladimir Putin has amassed so much central authority that the power-grab may undermine Moscow's commitment to democracy, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Saturday.

"In any country, if you don't have countervailing institutions, the power of any one president is problematic for democratic development," Rice told reporters after meeting with human-rights activists.

"I think there is too much concentration of power in the Kremlin. I have told the Russians that. Everybody has doubts about the full independence of the judiciary. There are clearly questions about the independence of the electronic media and there are, I think, questions about the strength of the Duma," said Rice, referring to the Russian parliament.

Or as it was put at TalkingPointsMemo, is there not a bit of irony here?

Rightist Spew

Some crap from Faux Nooz:

Time political analyst Mark Halperin asserted that if Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (NY), Sen. Barack Obama (IL), or former Sen. John Edwards (NC) "get[s] in" to the White House, "I think they're going to have a come-to-Jesus moment where they sit down with Dick Cheney and George Bush." Host Bill O'Reilly interjected, "And change their minds." Halperin continued: "And get a little bit of an eye-opening about just what's on the line every day in that job now, post 9-11 -- how hard it is."

What is this crap supposed to mean? That no one can be president because it's so hard post-9/11? Or only Dems can't but any Republican can? And what's so much harder since 9/11? One would think it's the Iraq fandango (and the silliness in Afghanistan) that's made it harder. Or is Halperin sort of, kind of referencing all the myriad screw-ups of Our Leaders?

No, what it is is specious crap, nonsense some of the feeble-minded will tke seriously....

Sub-Saharan Africa; What's The Story?

I mean, other than depressing. Why does it so lag much of the rest of the world? Overly corrupt leaders? Insufficient education? No meaningful investment? What's going on there that the people can't see what's happening in the rest of the worl and find it enticing? Too long too much the outsiders?

Talk about inscrutable.

For example look at this and see if you can figure out why this is so. South Africa became a majority-led state under the best circumstances and inside of what, 10, 20, years, it's come to this.... Why?

The Radical Leftist Agenda

Greenwald:

[Quoting Bill O'Reilly: W]ould you support President John Edwards? Remember, no coerced interrogation, civilian lawyers in courts for captured overseas terrorists, no branding the Iranian guards terrorists, and no phone surveillance without a specific warrant.

Who could even fathom an America plagued by habeas corpus, search warrants, and a military that fails to beat, freeze and mock-execute its detainees?

[more]

What a Goddam shame it would be for our nation to embrace, well, these former American policies....

The Large Man That Is Our Beloved Leader

Actually, this has been an administration of... well, I could use the C word but why diss all women? Less just say Our Leaders' machoness is actually the bully-like bleating of the manque, not real men. They are so not the real deal. Pols are per se unmanly and these guys hit a new low for that low standard even as they, and their enablers, mouth off.

So here's what a big man Our Beloved Leader is, the largeness of Our Beloved Leader, via the War Room:

Over the course of the last year, George W. Bush has offered his personal congratulations to the 2007 Presidential Scholars, the Super Bowl-winning Indianapolis Colts, the 2007 Scripps Spelling Bee champion, the owner of the World Series-winning St. Louis Cardinals, the NBA champion Miami Heat, the Stanley Cup-winning Carolina Hurricanes and the NCAA champions from 21 universities.

So, a reporter asked deputy White House press secretary Tony Fratto today, will the president be calling Al Gore to congratulate him for winning the Nobel Peace Prize? Fratto's response: "I don't know of any plans to make calls to any of the winners at this point."

Retire From The Military, Become A Traitor

From the Now He Tells Us Dept.:

In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration’s handling of the war “incompetent” and said the result was “a nightmare with no end in sight.”

Of course, as the rightwing bullshit machine would say in its faith-based way, What does he know?

A More Typical News Story, Reminiscent of Judy Miller

(Of course, in honor of my new obsession with Maggie Q, maybe I'll start refering to her as Judy M....)

This is more typical of the Times: How it relies on the thinnest straw to support a loony assertion of an alleged major sea-change:

In a number of Shiite neighborhoods across Baghdad, residents are beginning to turn away from the Mahdi Army, the Shiite militia they once saw as their only protector against Sunni militants. Now they resent it as a band of street thugs without ideology.

The hardening Shiite feeling in Baghdad opens an opportunity for the American military, which has long struggled against the Mahdi Army, as American commanders rely increasingly on tribes and local leaders in their prosecution of the war.

***

In interviews, 10 Shiites from four neighborhoods in eastern and western Baghdad described a pattern in which militia members, looking for new sources of income, turned on Shiites.

The pattern appears less frequently in neighborhoods where Sunnis and Shiites are still struggling for territory. Sadr City, the largest Shiite neighborhood, where the Mahdi Army’s face is more political than military, has largely escaped the wave of criminality.

Link.

Victory, it would seem is just around the corner.... Of course, the byline was a clue that the article was silly bullshit. If it was Dexter Filkins, then there would have been credibility to it... well, actually, so speciously sourced, it wouldn't have even been reported by him because it would have been too bogus....

Something, I Don't Know, Touching, Inspirational....

With death breathing down your neck, what can one do but keep on moving, one step at a time....

From the frigging Times (remember, when it's good, it's pretty Goddam good*):

Forty minutes before the start of the New York Marathon, Victor Navarra has always been in the same place, perched in the bucket of a rescue truck, surveying the starting line and sending down orders from 85 feet in the air.

“It’s like being God for a day,” said Navarra, 55, a retired Fire Department lieutenant who has coordinated the start of the race for 25 years. “I say something on the radio and it just happens.”

Each year, as the runners inched toward the race’s three starting lines, Navarra made last-minute adjustments so that the field, now numbering about 40,000, could safely leave Fort Wadsworth on Staten Island and set off across the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.

Now, in the buildup to his 26th New York City Marathon, Navarra’s biggest challenge will not be making sure that instructions to the runners are broadcast in seven languages or that 28,000 cups of coffee are ready for them. It will be living long enough to attend this year’s race.

He was diagnosed in 2005 as having malignant tumors next to his sinuses, a condition he attributes to volunteering at ground zero in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. In April of this year, Navarra said his doctors estimated he had three months to live after multiple operations to remove the tumors failed to eliminate the cancer. In July, he gathered his wife, two daughters and two grandchildren to celebrate Christmas early. By then, he had already planned his funeral. And last week, even though the tumors have taken away his eyesight, he was on conference calls with the New York Road Runners, going over minute details for the start of the Nov. 4 race.

“His faculties aren’t failing him when it comes to the marathon,” said Mary Wittenberg, the director of the marathon. “It’s been a rock for him as much as he’s been a rock for us.”

The mutual dependency is not lost on Navarra.

“I’m not a doctor, but the fact that I have a reason to get up keeps me going,” he said. “I wake up every day and I say: ‘I’m alive. That’s a good start.’”

Although he can barely stand and a tumor the size of an orange inside his mouth has impaired his speech, he still tells stories about the races he has seen since he began volunteering with the New York Marathon in 1976.

“The setup at the start was about six card tables,” Navarra said. “We’d cut a hole in the fence and send the runners onto the bridge with arrows painted on pieces of wood to tell them where to go.”

As the race grew from 2,000 runners to nearly 20 times that, he learned to innovate and is now credited with inventing the modern method to kick off a major marathon.

Now, on race day, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is closed to traffic shortly after midnight, leaving the organizers barely enough time to set up three separate starting corrals, each with its own athlete village that includes food, massage tents and the world’s longest urinal (285 feet). “You can make a mistake once,” Navarra said of setting up. “But you don’t do it again.”

Those six hours, between the time the bridge is closed and the time runners begin arriving at Fort Wadsworth, require a year of preparation. At every turn, Navarra said, a dozen things can and do go wrong. “I love challenges,” Navarra said. “If nothing went wrong, it would boring.”

He recalled the time, in 1993, when Mayor David N. Dinkins came to the start to watch the race’s founder, Fred Lebow, who was then dying of cancer, begin his last marathon. According to Navarra, Dinkins wanted a photograph of himself pretending to start the race.

“So, with 52 seconds to go before the start,” Navarra said, “Dinkins raises the air horn for the picture. All the cops saw this and they got nervous. The motorcycles start moving and adios. The runners started going out.”

It was his worst marathon moment. “When you work the whole year for that one second and lose it, I bawled my eyes out,” he said.

Navarra and Joanne, his wife of 37 years, have worked as a team to organize races throughout the country. But as much as Navarra enjoys the smaller events — he once did 22 in one year — New York is closest to his heart. That is why in 25 years, the marathon has become an afterthought to Navarra only once — on Sept. 11, 2001.

After 21 years of serving in the city’s Fire Department, Navarra had been retired for four years. “I got my family together, hugged them and made sure they were O.K.,” he said. “The next thing I had to do was go to the firehouse because I needed to know that I didn’t stay home and watch television. I had to do something for my brothers.”

His firehouse, Engine 40 and Ladder 35 at 66th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, was one of the hardest hit. Twenty-six men from the firehouse where he spent 11 years as a lieutenant set out that morning. Thirteen did not return.

“That’s my other family,” Navarra said. “I can never look through the list without falling apart. I can’t deal with it.”

On Sept. 12, Navarra was back in his fire gear and working the bucket brigades at ground zero, clearing debris and looking for survivors.

“Over the course of the next few weeks, I basically lived there, doing all sorts of things,” he said in his living room in Staten Island. “When I arrived, it was bedlam.”

Whether he was searching for his friends at ground zero or dealing with the countless donations that poured into the station, he tried not to let a second go to waste. He knew he also had a job to do for the marathon, which was only weeks away. Sleeping two or three hours a night, Navarra coordinated the start, and on the day of the race, with F-16s circling overhead and snipers on every roof, he was perched above Fort Wadsworth to make sure it went off without a hitch.

Navarra said he was convinced his exposure to ground zero’s noxious fumes and sweltering heat caused the cancer that left him blind and unable to walk.

He said he had been receiving regular examinations from the department’s 9/11 medical monitoring program and that commission doctors certified his condition as affected by the toxins at the site. For privacy reasons, Jim Long, a Fire Department spokesman, said he could not discuss or confirm medical records. Officials at the Uniformed Firefighters Association said they did not have access to medical records.

“I know I’m not going to live,” Navarra said. “How long I have, I don’t know. But I know that I’m never going to see my granddaughter get married.”

Still, Navarra has made a career of planning ahead, and he does not think now is a time to stop. He has already started thinking about the 2008 race. And even though he will probably not be there, his wife will continue the family tradition, hovering 85 feet above 40,000 runners.

(*It's just that it's rarer and rarer....)

A Little Nightmare for the Wingnuts

Wanted the Nobel Peace Prize to go to General Betray-Us.

Got President Gore instead.

Another Moral Exemplar....

An Illinois man who worked as a "Christian clown" named Klutzo was arrested yesterday on child pornography charges for allegedly taking naked photographs of young boys at a Philippines orphanage.

Yet Ann Coulter believes Christians are perfect. How do we reconcile the two...?

Under Our Leaders, America is Greater than Ever

(Illo link.)

The inference is, Jesus, maybe, uncontrolled, unchecked capitalism maybe isn't healthy for democracy.... And talk about an economy that ever-healthier reflects a distortion created by the growth of extreme wealth (but the, Our Leaders do not believe in facts or even reality).

Fox Bidness Journal:

The richest Americans' share of national income has hit a postwar record, surpassing the highs reached in the 1990s bull market, and underlining the divergence of economic fortunes blamed for fueling anxiety among American workers.

The wealthiest 1% of Americans earned 21.2% of all income in 2005, according to new data from the Internal Revenue Service. That is up sharply from 19% in 2004, and surpasses the previous high of 20.8% set in 2000, at the peak of the previous bull market in stocks.

***

The data highlight the political challenge facing Mr. Bush and the Republican contenders for president. They have sought to play up the strength of the economy since 2003 and low unemployment, and the role of Mr. Bush's tax cuts in both. But many Americans think the economy is in or near a recession. The IRS data show that the median tax filer's income -- half earn less than the median, half earn more -- fell 2% between 2000 and 2005 when adjusted for inflation, to $30,881. At the same time, the income level for the tax filer just inside the top 1% grew 3%, to $364,657.

Why We Love Micro$oft

"I'm one of those early adopters of Vista," said Yvonne Genovese, an analyst who was interviewing Ballmer along with fellow analyst David Smith on stage at a conference forum. "My daughter comes in one day and says, 'Hey Mom, my friend has Vista, and it has these neat little things called gadgets -- I need those.'"

Said Ballmer: "I love your daughter."

"You're not going to like her mom in about two minutes," said Genovese, while the crowd laughed.

She went on to explain that she installed Vista for her daughter -- and two days later went right back to using the XP operating system. "It's safe, it works, all the hardware is fine, and everything is great," she said of XP.

Genovese also argued that her experience with Vista is broadly shared: "What we're seeing and what we're hearing from users is a very similar thing. It's difficult to implement. What should we be seeing that we're not seeing?"

"Let's start with the end user. Your daughter saw a lot of value," said Ballmer.

"She's 13," Genovese shot back.

***

"I think there is a lot of value in Vista," he said. Ballmer went on to argue that the real issue for some customers is ensuring that everything they need to support the operating system -- such as device drivers -- is ready before they make the transition to Vista.

"When we initially shipped, fewer device drivers were ready for Vista than I would have liked, but we constantly worked with the device vendors to get new drivers available and implemented through our Windows update service," he said. And because of the changes made to the operating system to improve security, there were things some applications that vendors needed to update as well, according to Ballmer.

He then listed a number of a number of corporations that have installed Vista, including Citibank and Continental Airlines Inc. "We are in, from ... a corporate and enterprise side, an early adoption cycle," said Ballmer.

Service Pack 1 is in beta "and addresses a lot of the customer feedback," said Ballmer. Moreover, because of the "instrumentation" built into Vista, Microsoft knows what problems people are facing, what drivers are missing and what application compatibility problems they are having, he said.

Ballmer also said that Vista is bigger than XP, and "for some people that's an issue, and it's not going to get smaller in any significant way in SP1. But machines are constantly getting bigger, and [it's] probably important to remember that as well."

"Good, I'll let you come in and install it for me," said Genovese.

Link.

Why We Love The Times

War Room tells us why:

The New York Times on Democratic voters in rural Iowa: They may be racist, but they're also too stupid to do anything about it.

From the Times' piece this morning on Bill Richardson:

"In Iowa, he is taking a page from Mr. Edwards's playbook and courting rural Iowans -- who, under the complicated rules of the caucus, have disproportionate power and who may be uncomfortable supporting a woman or a black man.

"For these conservative voters, even though Mr. Richardson is the first Hispanic to seek the presidency, his name does not give that away, and Mr. Richardson does not define himself as the 'Hispanic candidate.'"

Why Is This Man Laughing?

Because he shits on you all the time.

(Photo link.)

What Mortgage Crisis?

Fox Bidness Journal:

The mortgage mess is claiming a new group of victims: renters.

Across the country, a rising number of landlords are falling behind on mortgage payments, sending their properties into foreclosure, according to legal-services attorneys, local officials and financial experts -- and in many cases, their tenants are being forced out of their homes. Often, the tenants' first inkling of trouble occurs when they get a letter from the bank directing them to leave the premises.

[more]

(Photo credit.)

The Leadership of Our Leaders: A Class Act

Now do you believe that they hate us, that they only believe we're there to be used by them?

From the War Room, Our Leaders' compassion:

Two words for Rush Limbaugh, right-wing bloggers and other Republicans who say the family of a 12-year-old boy the Democrats have used as a poster child for expanding SCHIP (the State Children's Health Insurance Program) is too rich to deserve government help with medical care: Tony Snow.

When Snow announced in August that he was leaving his job as White House press secretary, he said he was doing so because he "ran out of money." Snow made $168,000 at the White House and presumably received health insurance as a federal employee. Snow said that he'd made "more money" in his "previous career" working for Fox News, and that he didn't want to dip into what he'd managed to put away before coming to the White House just so that he could keep working there. "I made the decision not to say to my wife and kids, 'You know, we've finally saved up all this money and done these things, and you're just going to have to give them away so Daddy can work at the White House,'" Snow explained. "We took out a loan when I came to the White House, and that loan is now gone. So I'm going to have to pay the bills."

The clear implication: The $168,000 Snow was making at the White House wasn't enough to handle month-to-month expenses for Snow, his wife and their three kids.

So how about that 12-year-old? His family of six -- one kid bigger than Snow's -- has an annual income of about $45,000. Without SCHIP -- and without health insurance subsidized by an employer -- the family's only route to medical insurance for the kids would have been to buy it themselves on the open market, if they could have gotten it; they apparently tried but were refused because of preexisting conditions.

Yes, the family has equity in a house and a commercial property worth about $160,000, but anyone want to guess how long even a few hundred thousand dollars in equity would last if you had to pay out of pocket -- as the kid's family would have if not for SCHIP -- for the medical care for two children who suffered severe brain injuries in a car crash? And anyone want to explain how a family that makes $45,000 a year could afford the payments on the home equity loan that would have been needed to extract that equity in the first place?

Tony? You out there?

For Those Who Don't Learn From History, A Little History

Prof. Krugman's lecture of the day (and I thought Our Leaders were sort of unique...):

There have been a number of articles recently that portray President Bush as someone who strayed from the path of true conservatism. Republicans, these articles say, need to return to their roots.

Well, I don’t know what true conservatism is, but while doing research for my forthcoming book I spent a lot of time studying the history of the American political movement that calls itself conservatism — and Mr. Bush hasn’t strayed from the path at all. On the contrary, he’s the very model of a modern movement conservative.

For example, people claim to be shocked that Mr. Bush cut taxes while waging an expensive war. But Ronald Reagan also cut taxes while embarking on a huge military buildup.

People claim to be shocked by Mr. Bush’s general fiscal irresponsibility. But conservative intellectuals, by their own account, abandoned fiscal responsibility 30 years ago. Here’s how Irving Kristol, then the editor of The Public Interest, explained his embrace of supply-side economics in the 1970s: He had a “rather cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit and other monetary or fiscal problems” because “the task, as I saw it, was to create a new majority, which evidently would mean a conservative majority, which came to mean, in turn, a Republican majority — so political effectiveness was the priority, not the accounting deficiencies of government.”

People claim to be shocked by the way the Bush administration outsourced key government functions to private contractors yet refused to exert effective oversight over these contractors, a process exemplified by the failed reconstruction of Iraq and the Blackwater affair.

But back in 1993, Jonathan Cohn, writing in The American Prospect, explained that “under Reagan and Bush, the ranks of public officials necessary to supervise contractors have been so thinned that the putative gains of contracting out have evaporated. Agencies have been left with the worst of both worlds — demoralized and disorganized public officials and unaccountable private contractors.”

People claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s general incompetence. But disinterest in good government has long been a principle of modern conservatism. In “The Conscience of a Conservative,” published in 1960, Barry Goldwater wrote that “I have little interest in streamlining government or making it more efficient, for I mean to reduce its size.”

People claim to be shocked that the Bush Justice Department, making a mockery of the Constitution, issued a secret opinion authorizing torture despite instructions by Congress and the courts that the practice should stop. But remember Iran-Contra? The Reagan administration secretly sold weapons to Iran, violating a legal embargo, and used the proceeds to support the Nicaraguan contras, defying an explicit Congressional ban on such support.

Oh, and if you think Iran-Contra was a rogue operation, rather than something done with the full knowledge and approval of people at the top — who were then protected by a careful cover-up, including convenient presidential pardons — I’ve got a letter from Niger you might want to buy.

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration’s efforts to disenfranchise minority groups, under the pretense of combating voting fraud. But Reagan opposed the Voting Rights Act, and as late as 1980 he described it as “humiliating to the South.”

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration’s attempts — which, for a time, were all too successful — to intimidate the press. But this administration’s media tactics, and to a large extent the people implementing those tactics, come straight out of the Nixon administration. Dick Cheney wanted to search Seymour Hersh’s apartment, not last week, but in 1975. Roger Ailes, the president of Fox News, was Nixon’s media adviser.

People claim to be shocked at the Bush administration’s attempts to equate dissent with treason. But Goldwater — who, like Reagan, has been reinvented as an icon of conservative purity but was a much less attractive figure in real life — staunchly supported Joseph McCarthy, and was one of only 22 senators who voted against a motion censuring the demagogue.

Above all, people claim to be shocked by the Bush administration’s authoritarianism, its disdain for the rule of law. But a full half-century has passed since The National Review proclaimed that “the White community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail,” and dismissed as irrelevant objections that might be raised after “consulting a catalogue of the rights of American citizens, born Equal” — presumably a reference to the document known as the Constitution of the United States.

Now, as they survey the wreckage of their cause, conservatives may ask themselves: “Well, how did we get here?” They may tell themselves: “This is not my beautiful Right.” They may ask themselves: “My God, what have we done?”

But their movement is the same as it ever was. And Mr. Bush is movement conservatism’s true, loyal heir.

Moral Leadership

Minister dies, accidentally suffocated, tied up and wearing two wet suits, with a dildo... (read about it all here).

Query: Did his sermons reflect or reference his outside interest??

Where is the Honor?

Not here:

Two weeks ago, the Democratic radio address was delivered by a 12-year old Maryland boy named Graeme Frost. Graeme told his story of being involved in a severe car accident three years ago, and having received access to medical care because of the Children’s Health Insurance Program. He said:

If it weren’t for CHIP, I might not be here today. … We got the help we needed because we had health insurance for us through the CHIP program. But there are millions of kids out there who don’t have CHIP, and they wouldn’t get the care that my sister and I did if they got hurt. … I just hope the President will listen to my story and help other kids to be as lucky as me.

The right-wing immediately condemned Democrats for daring to put a human face on the SCHIP program at a time when Bush was proposing a “diminishment of the number of children covered.” Rep. John Boehner (R-OH) — who has posed with children to advance his own political agenda — claimed Graeme was being used “as a human shield.”

Conservatives have more recently turned their targets on young Graeme Frost himself. A poster at the Free Republic propagated information alleging that Frost was actually a rich kid being pampered by the government. Among other bits of information, the post by the Freeper “icwhatudo” asserts that Graeme and his sister Gemma attend wealthy schools that cost “nearly $40,000 per year for tuition” and live in a well-off home.

The smear attack against Graeme has taken firm hold in the right-wing blogosphere. The National Review, Michelle Malkin, Wizbang, Powerline, and the Weekly Standard blog have all launched assaults on the Frost family. The story is slowly working its way into traditional media outlets as well.

Here are the facts that the right-wing distorted in order to attack young Graeme:

1) Graeme has a scholarship to a private school. The school costs $15K a year, but the family only pays $500 a year.

2) His sister Gemma attends another private school to help her with the brain injuries that occurred due to her accident. The school costs $23,000 a year, but the state pays the entire cost.

3) They bought their “lavish house” sixteen years ago for $55,000 at a time when the neighborhood was less than safe.

4) Last year, the Frosts made $45,000 combined. Over the past few years they have made no more than $50,000 combined.

5) The state of Maryland has found them eligible to participate in the CHIP program.

Desperate to defend Bush’s decision to cut off millions of children from health care, the right wing has stooped to launching baseless and uninformed attacks against a 12 year old child and his family.

Right wing bloggers have been harassing the Frosts, calling their home numerous times to get information about their private lives. Compassionate conservatism indeed.

Link.

Our Leaders: Genius in Action

Maybe Our Beloved Leader actually does lead his administration. Maybe its stupidity is a trickle down thing, you know? Rot at the top and all that?

From the War Room, Our Leaders work to make the world and our country safer by refusing to heed those who know better:

When the private SITE intelligence group obtained a copy of the most recent Osama bin Laden video, SITE founder Rita Katz provided free and early access to White House counsel Fred Fielding and Michael Leiter, the principal deputy director of the government's National Counterterrorism Center. Just one condition, she said: "We ask you not to distribute ... [as] it could harm our investigations."

The Washington Post explains what happened next: About 12 minutes after Katz e-mailed a link to the video to Fielding and Leiter, somebody at the Pentagon used the link to access it. Two minutes later, someone at the Defense Department's Network Information Center did the same. A minute later, someone at the Army Information System Command used the link. Within the next three hours, the Post says, computers with "addresses registered to defense and intelligence agencies" accessed the video dozens of times.

By that afternoon, the Post says, journalists had transcripts of the video and were talking about it on television. Katz says al-Qaida supporters responded by taking steps to block SITE from using the methods it had used to get the video in the first place. The result, Katz says: "Techniques that took years to develop are now ineffective and worthless."

(Photo link.)

The Jesusphone

A new believer.

I have one and it's so cool and awesome that one overlooks that as a phone it's only okay. But great web apps, iPod and PDA/PIM stuff, and a great design.

The goddess, Xeni, has an early write up that... well, viscerally, it rivals porn, if you know what I mean, okay? And the one review that sums it all up.

(Illo credit.)

Now We Know Who's To Blame For Our Current Leadership

Link.

Faux News Steps Away From Reporting News To Tell Us That Environmental Disaster Is A Good Thing

A significantly melted Arctic icecap is a good thing -- Hell, it's "vital".
And you thought FNC was no more than a propaganda machine for Our Leaders and the radical ultra-rightists....

(Logo credit.)

Crazy Rightwing Crap

One of those wingnuts who spread shit for a living:

I've thought for a long time that Obama's not in quite as strong a position on the war in Iraq as he really thinks he is. Remember, when he famously came out against the war, it was back in a time when the entire world believed that Saddam Hussein in Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, that he would probably be willing to use them himself at some time or pass them along to terrorists who would use them. And yet, Barack Obama was against going to the war at that point. I don't think that shows that he is very strong on national security, which he needs to be.

And what Obama said in the 2002 speech the whack liar was referencing:

What I am opposed to is a dumb war. What I am opposed to is a rash war. What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other armchair, weekend warriors in this administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.

What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income -- to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression. That's what I'm opposed to. A dumb war. A rash war. A war based not on reason but on passion, not on principle but on politics. Now let me be clear -- I suffer no illusions about Saddam Hussein. He is a brutal man. A ruthless man. A man who butchers his own people to secure his own power. He has repeatedly defied UN resolutions, thwarted UN inspection teams, developed chemical and biological weapons, and coveted nuclear capacity. He's a bad guy. The world, and the Iraqi people, would be better off without him.

But I also know that Saddam poses no imminent and direct threat to the United States, or to his neighbors, that the Iraqi economy is in shambles, that the Iraqi military a fraction of its former strength, and that in concert with the international community he can be contained until, in the way of all petty dictators, he falls away into the dustbin of history. I know that even a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences. I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of Al Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars.

So Obama was in fact denying the existent of WMDs -- which we know -- and those of us with eyes open at the time knew -- well, just didn't exist, was an Administration lie, plain and simple.

Link to the quotes.

Why Shouldn't the Stock and Financial Markets Keep Rising?

There are certain memes locked into the public discourse for which the reasons for being locked in I don't understand. Like Our Beloved Leader actually sets policy or even, most of the time, selects "his" "aides".

And this is the second: Why a devise for making money by speculating, fueled not by responses to reality but simply all the loose cash for growing wealth with no where to go since it isn't taxed to, like, pay for schools or the Iraq fandango or children's healthcare or whatever, shouldn't just keep rising independent of reality.

This piece just shows the continued life of that meme that the stock market has any significant relationship to the economy as opposed, basically, to the economy of the wealthy. I mean, if the subprime disaster isn't enough to slow it down....

Follow Our Leaders' Actions too Closely and this is What You Need

Thanks to Canadian health care....

The Dream of the Exiled Anti-Saddamites was in Fact a Nightmare that's Come True

Query: You watch the radical right in the America fuel the destruction of Saddam's Iraq after Gulf War I then you push for an invasion to kick Saddam out (because the Iraqis can't be made to rebel) and you expect what? A better Iraq? How does one achieve that level of stupidity? These exiles are in fact traitors, every last one of them.

Dexter Filkins, in a profile of one Saddam-hating exile in the freedom of Boston:

Then came Fouad Ajami, a Johns Hopkins professor of Middle East history, a Lebanese-American intimately identified with the Iraqi project. The American invasion of Iraq, Ajami said between bites of fish, would yet prove to be a transforming moment in the region. “Persuading the Americans to take down Saddam was Chalabi’s finest hour,” Ajami said, referring to the Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi. The conversation drifted along on a cloud of agreement until Kanan Makiya, an Iraqi intellectual and professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies at Brandeis University near Boston, leaned forward to pose a question.

“How many Iraqis have died since 2003?” Makiya asked his friends.

There was silence at the table. Makiya was asking the others, but he also seemed to be asking himself.

“Five hundred thousand?” Makiya mused. “Two hundred thousand? What are the estimates?”

Someone said something about a study.

“It’s getting closer to Saddam,” Makiya said. Then he sat back in his chair, and the conversation continued on its way.

That moment in Dokan encapsulated the terrible paradox of the Iraq war and, for Makiya, a crushing turn in a long personal journey.

[way more]

If There is Such a Thing as a Justifiable Lynching, this is it

Rich on the embarrassment that is Justice Clarence Thomas -- idiot or blatant liar:

WHAT'S the difference between a low-tech lynching and a high-tech lynching? A high-tech lynching brings a tenured job on the Supreme Court and a $1.5 million book deal. A low-tech lynching, not so much.

Pity Clarence Thomas. Done in by what he calls "left-wing zealots draped in flowing sanctimony" — as he describes anyone who challenged his elevation to the court — he still claims to have suffered as much as African-Americans once victimized by "bigots in white robes." Since kicking off his book tour on "60 Minutes" last Sunday, he has been whining all the way to the bank, often abetted by a press claque as fawning as his No. 1 fan, Rush Limbaugh.

We are always at a crossroads with race in America, and so here we are again. The rollout of Justice Thomas's memoir, "My Grandfather's Son," is not happening in a vacuum. It follows a Supreme Court decision (which he abetted) outlawing voluntary school desegregation plans in two American cities. It follows yet another vote by the Senate to deny true Congressional representation to the majority black District of Columbia. It follows the decision by the leading Republican presidential candidates to snub a debate at a historically black college as well as the re-emergence of a low-tech lynching noose in Jena, La.

Perhaps most significant of all, Mr. Thomas's woe-is-me tour unfolds against the backdrop of the presidential campaign of an African-American whose political lexicon does not include martyrdom or rage. "My Grandfather's Son" may consciously or not echo the title of Barack Obama's memoir of genealogy and race, "Dreams From My Father," but it might as well be written in another tongue.

It's useful to watch Mr. Thomas at this moment, 16 years after his riveting confirmation circus. He is a barometer of what has and has not changed since then because he hasn't changed at all. He still preaches against black self-pity even as he hyperbolically tries to cast his Senate cross-examination by Joe Biden as tantamount to the Ku Klux Klan assassination of Medgar Evers. He still denies that he is the beneficiary of the very race-based preferences he deplores. He still has a dubious relationship with the whole truth and nothing but, and not merely in the matter of Anita Hill.

This could be seen most vividly on "60 Minutes," when he revisited a parable about the evils of affirmative action that is also a centerpiece of his memoir: his anger about the "tainted" degree he received from Yale Law School. In Mr. Thomas's account, he stuck a 15-cent price sticker on his diploma after potential employers refused to hire him. By his reckoning, a Yale Law graduate admitted through affirmative action, as he was, would automatically be judged inferior to whites with the same degree. The "60 Minutes" correspondent, Steve Kroft, maintained that Mr. Thomas had no choice but to settle for a measly $10,000-a-year job (in 1974 dollars) in Missouri, working for the state's attorney general, John Danforth.

What "60 Minutes" didn't say was that the post was substantial — an assistant attorney general — and that Mr. Danforth was himself a Yale Law graduate. As Mr. Danforth told the story during the 1991 confirmation hearings and in his own book last year, he traveled to New Haven to recruit Mr. Thomas when he was still a third-year law student. That would be before he even received that supposedly worthless degree. Had it not been for Yale taking a chance on him in the first place, in other words, Mr. Thomas would never have had the opportunity to work the Yalie network to jump-start his career and to ascend to the Supreme Court. Mr. Danforth, a senator in 1991, was the prime mover in shepherding the Thomas nomination to its successful conclusion.

Bill O'Reilly may have deemed the "60 Minutes" piece "excellent," but others spotted the holes. Marc Morial, the former New Orleans mayor who now directs the National Urban League, told Tavis Smiley on PBS that it was "as though Justice Thomas's public relations firm edited the piece." On CNN, Jeffrey Toobin, the author of the new best-seller about the court, "The Nine," said that it was "real unfair" for "60 Minutes" not to include a response from Ms. Hill, who was slimed on camera by Mr. Thomas as "not the demure, religious, conservative person" she said she was.

Ms. Hill, who once taught at Oral Roberts University and is now a professor at Brandeis, told me last week that CBS News was the only one of the three broadcast news divisions that did not seek her reaction to the latest Thomas salvos. Mr. Kroft told me that there were no preconditions placed on him by either Mr. Thomas or his publisher. "Our story wasn't about Anita Hill," he said. "Our story was about Clarence Thomas."

In any event, the piece no more challenged Mr. Thomas's ideas than it did his insinuations about Ms. Hill. As Mr. Smiley and Cornel West noted on PBS, "60 Minutes" showed an old clip of Al Sharpton at an anti-Thomas rally rather than give voice to any of the African-American legal critics of Justice Thomas's 300-plus case record on the court. In 2007, no less than in 1991, a clownish Sharpton clip remains the one-size-fits-all default representation of black protest favored by too many white journalists.

The free pass CBS gave Mr. Thomas wouldn't matter were he just another celebrity "get" hawking a book. Unfortunately, there's the little matter of all that public policy he can shape — more so than ever now that John Roberts and Samuel Alito have joined him as colleagues. Indeed, Justice Thomas, elevated by Bush 41, was the crucial building block in what will probably prove the most enduring legacy of Bush 43, a radical Supreme Court. The "compassionate conservative" who turned the 2000 G.O.P. convention into a minstrel show to prove his love of diversity will exit the political stage as the man who tilted American jurisprudence against Brown v. Board of Education. He leaves no black Republican behind him in either the House or Senate.

While actuarial tables promise a long-lived Bush court, the good news is that the polarizing racial politics exemplified by the president and Mr. Thomas is on the wane elsewhere. Fittingly, the book tour for "My Grandfather's Son" began just as word of Harry Dent's death arrived from South Carolina last weekend. An aide to Strom Thurmond and then to Richard Nixon, Mr. Dent was the architect of the "Southern strategy" that exploited white backlash against the civil-rights movement to turn the South into a Republican stronghold.

Mr. Dent recanted years later, telling The Washington Post when he retired from politics in 1981 that he was sorry he had "stood in the way of rights of black people." His peers and successors have been less chastened. One former Nixon White House colleague, Pat Buchanan, said on "Meet the Press" last weekend that it was no big deal for Republican candidates to skip a debate before an African-American audience because blacks make up only about 10 percent of the voting public and Republicans only get about a tenth of that anyway. It didn't occur to Mr. Buchanan that in 21st-century America many white voters are also offended by politicians who snub black Americans — whether at a campaign debate or in the rubble of Hurricane Katrina.

Republicans who play the race card may find that it has an expiration date even in the South. In 2000, Mr. Bush could speak at Bob Jones University when it still forbade interracial dating among its students, and John McCain could be tarred as the father of an illegitimate black child in the South Carolina primary. No more. Just ask the former Senator George Allen, the once invincible Republican prince of Virginia, whose career ended in 2006 after his use of a single racial slur.

Mr. Thomas seems ignorant of this changing America. He can never see past his enemies' list, which in his book expands beyond his political foes, Yale and the press to "elite white women" and "paternalistic big-city whites" and "light-skinned blacks." (He does include a warm mention of Mr. Thurmond, a supporter in 1991, without mentioning that the senator hid away a child fathered with a black maid.) Always eager to cast himself as a lynching victim, Mr. Thomas is far more trapped in the past than the 1960s civil-rights orthodoxy he relentlessly demonizes.

The only way he can live with his various hypocrisies, it seems, is to claim that he's the rare honest, politically incorrect black man who has the guts to tell African-Americans what no other black leader will. Thus he asserted to a compliant Jan Crawford Greenburg of ABC News last week that everyone except him tiptoes around talk of intraracial crime and out-of-wedlock births.

This will come as news to the millions of Americans who have heard Mr. Obama, among other African-American leaders whose words give the lie to this bogus claim. But the fact that America's highest court harbors a justice as full of unreconstructed racial bitterness as Clarence Thomas will prove more eye-opening still.

Springsteen

Me, I'm ambivalent about the Boss. Love the "Born in the U.S.A." album, don't theink there's even ten other tracks of his that do much for me.

On the other hand, he's a comrade and is an unusually honest performer. He puts out at live shows like he's the hardest working man in showbiz (yeah, yeah, harder than JB was, maybe, but in an apples and oranges way.

That said, when the Boss nails it -- pow, right out of the ballpark. Two off of "Magic":

Radio Nowhere

I was tryin' to find my way home
but all I heard was a drone
bouncing off a satellite
crushin' the last lone American night
this is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
this is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?

I was spinnin' 'round a dead dial
just another lost number in a file
dancin' down a dark hole
just searchin' for a world with some soul

this is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
this is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
is there anybody alive out there?

I just want to hear some rhythm
I just want to hear some rhythm
I just want to hear some rhythm
I just want to hear some rhythm

I want a thousand guitars
I want pounding drums
I want a million different voices speaking in tongues

this is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
this is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
is there anybody alive out there?

I was driving through the misty rain
searchin' for a mystery train
boppin' through the wild blue
tryin' to make a connection to you

this is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
this is radio nowhere, is there anybody alive out there?
is there anybody alive out there?

I just want to feel some rhythm
I just want to feel some rhythm
I just want to feel your rhythm
I just want to feel your rhythm
I just want to feel your rhythm
I just want to feel your rhythm
I just want to feel your rhythm
I just want to feel your rhythm

Then for Our Beloved Leader, one to slap (or more particularly have someone slap for him) onto his iPod and then to have same shoved deeply up his nasty, lazy, stupid ass:

Last to Die

we took the highway till
the road went black
we'd marked, Truth or
Consequences on our map
a voice drifted up from the radio
and I thought of a voice from long ago

who'll be the last to die for a mistake
the last to die for a mistake
whose blood will spill, whose heart wil break
who'll be the last to die, for a mistake

kids asleep in the backseat
we're just counting the miles, you and me
we don't measure the blood
we've drawn anymore
we just stack the bodies outside the door

who'll be the last to die for a mistake
the last to die for a mistake
whose blood will spill, whose heart wil break
who'll be the last to die, for a mistake

the wise men were all fools, what to do
the sun sets in flames as the city burns
another day gone down as the night turns
and I hold you here in my heart
as things fall apart

a downtown window flushed with light
"faces of the dead at five"
our martyr's silent eyes
petition the drivers as we pass by

who'll be the last to die for a mistake
the last to die for a mistake
darlin' will tyrants and kings
fall to the same fate
strung up at your city gates
who'll be the last to die for a mistake

(Both written and (c) by Bruce Springsteen)

The Sub-Prime Disaster in Orlando

So how did so many people end up in this fix?

"They didn't really look at the quality of the people who could afford to pay the loans," Randy Martin of the Orlando Association of Realtors said. [Not that a realotor has, you know, any responsibility to a buyer.]

Mortgage brokers signed people up for the biggest, fanciest house possible, offering low rates to buyers didn't truly understand.

"I've had clients come in and I've told them that they had an adjustable rate mortgage because I read their mortgage to them. They had no idea," lawyer Rosalyn Dunlap said.

Many people are now so desperate they'll try anything to get out of the mess they're in. They are trapped in homes they can't afford and can't sell.

Some mortgage companies and lenders don't want you to know how bankruptcy lawyers can help, telling you bankruptcy is for deadbeats.

In bankruptcy, retirement savings and 401(k)s [and in Florida, homes as well!!] are protected. You can be freed from second and third mortgage obligations. Some lawyers are even negotiating directly with lenders, which has never been done.

Link (editorial notes added).

That's pretty interesting. But what's nearly more interesting is that in Celebration, a town created by Disney, 50% of the homes are on the market!

What the Wingnuts Find Funny

[Sheikh] Mishan receives us as honored guests. I am so at ease that I soon commit a faux pas: I tell an “Iraqi joke,” which, in my defense, seems safe because I have been told it by an Iraqi-army colonel.

This is the joke: In Saddam-era Iraq, an official of the Baath party is informed that he is to be transferred out of Baghdad to become head of one of the provincial party offices. His daughter is very upset because she is studying English and loves the teacher she has in Baghdad. Father promises to find a great new English teacher for her in their new home.

A few weeks after they move, the Baath official calls his men in and tells them, “Go find the man who speaks the best English in this town.” They leave right away. Several days later, the official realizes that he has never heard back about the best English-speaker, so he calls his men in and asks if they were able to find him. “Yes sir,” say the men. “We beat the confession out of him. He is buried in the back.”

My hosts and the other guests laugh and nod politely at the punch line. Then a Marine lieutenant takes me aside and says gravely, “Mario, think. The joke was told to you by an Iraqi-army colonel, which means that he was probably Shiite. And this is Baath country. Basically you just told a Shiite joke making fun of these people.”

Link.

Fred Thompson's Key to Victory in Iraq

All the front-running GOP whackos are running on platforms essentially more of the same failed policies of Our Leaders.

However, Thompson looks like he won't only continue Our Beloved Leader's policies (well, not actually his since he, doesn't, you know, lead) but him for his personal idiocy as well:

"Congressional Democrats are trying to divert attention from insulting our military leader in Iraq and pandering to the loony left by attacking Rush Limbaugh. He is one of the strongest supporters of our troops, yet Democrats claim he is not being strong enough. I wonder who General Petraeus and his troops think is most supportive."

WTF News: Who's Running Things in Iraq?

It's a prime example of the lawlessness in Iraq. The details are sketchy and disputed, but here they are: An Iraqi corruption judge, continually thwarted in his pursuit of justice, finally helps convict a high-ranking official. But then the official breaks out of jail. Or, rather, the official is helped out of jail by guards working for one defense contractor, but is then returned -- only to leave jail with the help of another. Allegedly.

Testimony today from Iraqi corruption judge Radhi Hamza al-Radhi touched on the conviction of Ayham al-Samarrai, the former Iraqi electricity minister. al-Radhi helped put al-Samarrai away for what the judge called "wasting" public funds. al-Samarrai is the highest-ranking official to be convicted of corruption in Iraq.

His name may be familiar to Blackwater watchers. Last month, an Iraqi defense official told McClatchy's Leila Fadel that Blackwater helped break al-Samarrai out of prison in the Green Zone last December. Today, however, al-Radhi suggested that the defense official was wrong. A rival private-security company, DynCorp, assisted al-Samarrai's prison break, al-Radhi said.

But DynCorp says it's a huge misunderstanding. "It's absolutely untrue," says spokesman Gregory Lagana. "We are absolutely 100 percent convinced it wasn't us." However, Lagana says, he knows why al-Radhi thinks DynCorp was behind it. Two DynCorp employees, one named George Dillman and another whom Lagana didn't recall, were stationed in Iraq to assist in training Iraqi policemen. Among the police stations the two were detailed to was the Green Zone station where al-Samarrai was detained. In October, al-Samarrai, who holds dual U.S.-Iraqi citizenship, told the DynCorp employees that he would be murdered if he was convicted.

When Samarrai was convicted, the DynCorp employees tried to help al-Samarrai, to whom they had become sympathetic. They improperly transported him to the U.S. embassy to seek protection for him. But the embassy told them that their intended transfer was improper, and took al-Samarrai back to the Iraqi police. "That was our last contact with him, and the two guys were fired," Lagana said. "They had no business doing what they did." The story was first reported in The Chicago Tribune last December.

However, al-Samarrai's story doesn't end there. According to Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-MA) -- and confirmed by Stuart Bowen, the special inspector general for Iraq reconstruction -- al-Samarrai is currently living in Chicago. It's still not certain which contractor sprung al-Samarrai from jail. But beyond that: who helped al-Samarrai get back into the U.S.?

Link.

The crook in question, Ayham al-Samarrai, the former Iraqi electricity minister, now apparently lives in Chicago. So maybe they can ask him.

In Case You Wondered, I Use "Beloved" Ironically

Worst. President. Ever.

Well, certainly damn close to the dishonor.

And this AP article excerpted here erred a little bit in W's favor! The reality is even worse....

Over and over, President Bush confidently promised to "solve problems, not pass them on to future presidents and future generations." As the clock runs out on his eight-year presidency, a tall stack of troubles remain and Bush's words ring hollow.

Iraq, budget deficits, the looming insolvency of Social Security and Medicare, high health and energy costs, a national immigration mess — the next president will inherit these problems in January 2009. With Bush's popularity at an all time low and relations with the Democratic-led Congress acrimonious, he has little or no chance of pulling off a surprise victory in his time left.

"We're in a worse place than we were in 1999" before Bush became president, lamented Matthew Dowd, a former pollster and chief campaign strategist for Bush who has become disillusioned with his old boss.

When Americans are asked to choose national priorities, they most commonly name the economy, health care, the war in Iraq, terrorism and gas prices. Consider the state of play on these and other issues:

_The economy is relatively sound and deficits are falling after peaking in 2004. But an entire presidency of red ink has ballooned the overall federal debt from $5.7 trillion when Bush became president to $8.9 trillion now. The Iraq war, including providing medical care and disability benefits to veterans, as well as expensive new programs like a Medicare prescription drug benefit threaten to drive deficits back up. Economists fear growing odds of a recession. [This should make the victims of the sub-prime mess, enabled by greed and the administration-fueled failure of oversight, happy to hear as they lose homes and money.]

_The nation's health care spending, public and private, totaled $1.5 trillion when Bush took office. By the time he leaves, it is expected to be $2.6 trillion — a 75 percent increase. Meanwhile, the nation's number of uninsured has swelled, from 14 percent of the population in 2001 to 16 percent last year, or a total of 47 million people.

_Now in its fifth year, the Iraq war has claimed the lives of more than 3,800 members of the U.S. military and more than 73,000 Iraqi civilians, wounded over 28,000 U.S. military personnel, and cost nearly half a trillion dollars. Even if combat ends, Bush says the United States will need to provide military, economic and political support beyond his presidency and have "an enduring relationship" with Iraq.

_No domestic terrorist attack has followed those of Sept. 11, 2001. [Not true. There was that alleged anthrax attack the source of which was never investigated.] But the intelligence community concluded in July, nearly six years after the attacks, that al-Qaida has been allowed to re-centralize and rejuvenate itself in Pakistan, where the still-missing Osama bin Laden is believed to be hiding.

_Energy prices are volatile, and high. The cost of a barrel of oil has soared during Bush's presidency, from $29 to about $80 a barrel. Gas prices averaged $1.45 a gallon in 2001 and now are running about $2.80 — a 93 percent increase.

_With 78 million baby boomers beginning to retire, Social Security and Medicare move closer to insolvency each day. The Social Security trust fund is expected to last until 2041, while Medicare's will be exhausted much earlier, by 2019. Bush tried to overhaul Social Security [in a way that would exacerbate the problem] but couldn't find enough votes even when Republicans controlled the Congress.

_Bush tried unsuccessfully to make dramatic changes in the nation's immigration laws. There are an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the country and a few hundred thousand more come in each year.

_Bush promised to be "a uniter, not a divider," but instead, the partisan warfare has gotten worse.

"It's hard to find something he has done that really has improved the situation a great deal," said Stephen J. Wayne, a Georgetown University presidential scholar.

On June 23, 2003, Bush said: "I came to the office of the presidency to solve problems, not to pass them on to future presidents and future generations. I came to seize opportunities instead of letting them slip away." He was in New York, for the opening swing of his 2004 re-election campaign.

This get-the-job-done approach to governing had been a bedrock of Bush's first presidential race in 2000. The particular line appeared only briefly, though, as a rebuttal to Democrat Al Gore's Social Security plan. It was only with that New York speech that it became a staple, as the president sought a return to the White House in 2004 and stumped for fellow Republicans in the 2006 midterm elections.

"It's definitely part of his self-image to be a doer, and to be a person who throws the long pass and does big things, not just small things," said Bruce Buchanan, a University of Texas political scientist. [The record speaks for itself: he was never a doer, only a talker.]

The image was effective with voters. It also hinted at Bush's more sweeping political aspirations. He had hopes of governing in a way that would attract new constituencies into the Republican Party, transforming it into the nation's dominant political force far beyond his time.

This new agenda for an ascendant GOP included rigorous national educational standards, more market-based approaches to health care and retirement, increased emphasis on religious providers of government-funded social services, and radical changes in immigration policy to enhance enforcement and legitimize millions of illegals.

Only small bits have come to pass.

They include an expansion of health savings accounts, the addition of the prescription drug benefit [in the most inefficient way possible], along with other modernizations, to Medicare, and increased government money to religious charities.

A sweeping new education law now requires regular testing of children and penalizes many schools that fall short. There are serious doubts, however, that the law has enough support to be renewed this year — much less expanded as Bush wants.

On the foreign policy front, the president set the grand goal of "ending tyranny in our world." But early signs of progress on spreading democracy gave way to many setbacks. And the entire project has largely been eclipsed, some say hobbled, by continuing instability in Iraq.

(Emphases and stuff added.)

Lies of Our Leaders; This Minute's Update

In response to the latest monthly employment report, the White House released a "fact sheet" yesterday bragging about the president's record on job creation. It led Paul Krugman to take a closer look at Bush's numbers as compared to his predecessor's.

Over the whole of the Clinton administration, the economy added 22.7 million jobs -- 237,000 per month.

Over the whole of the Bush administration to date, the economy added only 5.8 million jobs -- 72,000 per month.

But, the White House says, the first two years of Bush's presidency shouldn't count because there was a recession and 9/11 affected the economy. It's only fair, the president's supporters say, to start counting since August 2003, and forget about his first 32 months in office.

Fine, Krugman said. Bush's monthly average, using the cherry-picked timeline, still trails Clinton, 172,000 per month to 237,000 per month.

Krugman concludes, "Did I mention that the Clinton job boom followed an, um, increase in taxes?"

I'd only add that U.S. News recently asked Rudy Giuliani about this in an interview about economic policy. The magazine said, "The Democrats are going to say, 'We raised taxes in the '90s, cut the deficit, and the economy boomed.' Why not try and rerun the '90s instead of cutting taxes?"

Giuliani responded, "Because we have actually done more job creation by lowering taxes than by raising taxes."

Reality shows otherwise.

Link.