Political momentum in Iraq hit a sudden roadblock on Wednesday when a feud between the largest Shiite factions led to the veto of a law that had been passed with great fanfare two weeks ago. The law had been heralded by the Bush administration as a breakthrough for national reconciliation.Link (emphasis added).
The law called for provincial elections by October, and it was hoped that it would eliminate severe electoral distortions that have left Kurds and Shiites with vastly disproportionate power over Sunni Arabs in some areas, a factor in fueling the Sunni insurgency. It would also have given Iraqis who have long complained of corrupt and feckless local leaders a chance to clean house and elect officials they believe are more accountable.
But the law was vetoed at the last minute by the three-member Iraqi presidency council, which includes President Jalal Talabani and two vice presidents. The veto came after officials in a powerful Shiite party, the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, objected to provisions that they contend unlawfully strip power from Iraq’s provinces.
Politicians involved in the debate said the main objections came from Vice President Adel Abdul Mehdi, a Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council member. The bill now goes back to Parliament, where its prospects are unclear, given the acrimonious debate over the issue that led to the veto.
Even if the law is approved, Parliament must fill vacant election commission seats and approve an elections law before provincial contests can occur.
The veto is “somewhat of a setback,” Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, acknowledged Wednesday during a hearing in Congress.
A common refrain among American combat commanders is that new local elections could help sweep out ineffective leaders while remedying deeply uneven provincial councils, a legacy partly of the Sunni Arab boycott of previous provincial elections.
In Sunni-dominated Nineveh and Salahuddin Provinces, for example, Kurds enjoy far more power on provincial councils than their numbers would otherwise dictate. And in Diyala, Shiites dominate the government even though Sunnis account for a majority in the region, a situation that has exacerbated the fierce sectarian violence there.
The veto exposed the deep rift between the ambitions of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, or S.I.I.C., which controls provincial governments throughout most of Shiite-dominated southern Iraq, and the more nationalist Shiite factions that include lawmakers loyal to the firebrand cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
S.I.I.C. officials want provincial leaders to be allowed to operate with little interference from Baghdad. They also fear that they will lose power in some southern provinces to more popular slates put up by Mr. Sadr’s movement if new provincial elections are held. And they contend that the bill wrongly allowed the prime minister to fire provincial governors and diminished the provinces’ budgetary and administrative powers.
The Sadrists, who were furious at the veto, want to retain a strong central government that has the legal muscle to deal vigorously any province that Baghdad leaders believe is acting against the country’s best interests. They said the veto breached the historic agreement among political blocs two weeks ago that allowed the simultaneous passage of the provincial powers bill, the 2008 budget and another law granting amnesty to thousands of Sunnis and others in Iraqi jails.
“It’s a struggle of two wills,” said Nassar al-Rubaie, a legislator from the Sadr movement. “One side wants to strengthen the central government and federal authority, and the other wants to undermine it and grant the provinces greater powers.”
Friday, February 29, 2008
Victory In Iraq Again Slips Through Our Fingers
Damn, it's tough forcing something on these Iraqis they don't want. And it's not we really care either -- this is just for domestic consumption -- as long as they let us keep a bunch of bases in their country, nothing else matters.
Our Leaders' responses To The Victims Of Corrupt Lending: Drop Dead!
Paulson:
In an interview yesterday, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson branded many of the aid proposals circulating in Washington as "bailouts" for reckless lenders, investors and speculators, rather than measures that would provide meaningful relief to deserving, but cash-strapped, mortgage borrowers.[more]
This Minute's Reason Why The Saint Sucks
Next month marks 19 years since the Exxon Valdez dumped its load of crude oil across the Prince William Sound, Alaska. A big gooey load of this crude spilled over the lands of the Chenega Natives. Paul Kompkoff was a seal-hunter for the village. That is, until Exxon’s ship killed the seal and poisoned the rest of Chenega’s food supply.Link.
While cameras rolled, Exxon executives promised they’d compensate everyone. Today, before the US Supreme Court, the big oil company’s lawyers argued that they shouldn’t have to pay Paul or other fishermen the damages ordered by the courts.
They can’t pay Paul anyway. He’s dead.
That was part of Exxon’s plan. They told me that. In 1990 and 1991, I worked for the Chenega and Chugach Natives of Alaska on trying to get Exxon to pay up to save the remote villages of the Sound. Exxon’s response was, “We can hold out in court until you’re all dead.”
Nice guys. But, hell, they were right, weren’t they?
But Exxon didn’t do it alone. They had enablers. One was a failed oil driller named “Dubya.” Exxon was the second largest contributor to George W. Bush’s political career. Enron was firstr. They were a team, Exxon and Enron.
To protect their corporate backsides, Enron’s Chairman Ken Lay, prior to his felony convictions, funded a group called Texans for Law Suit Reform. The idea was to prevent consumers, defrauded stockholders and devastated Natives from suing felonious corporations and their chiefs.
When Dubya went to Washington, Enron and Exxon got their golden pass in the appointment of Chief Justice John Roberts. On Wednesday, as the court heard Exxon’s latest stall, Roberts said, in defense of Exxon’s behavior in Alaska, “What more can a corporation do?”
The answer, Your Honor, is plenty.
For starters, Mr. Roberts, Exxon could have turned on the radar. What? On the night the Exxon Valdez smacked into Bligh Reef, the Raycas radar system was turned off. Exxon shipping honchos decided it was too expensive to maintain it and train their navigators to use it. So, the inexperienced third mate at the wheel was driving the supertanker by eyeball, Christopher Columbus style. I kid you not.
Here’s what else this poor ‘widdle corporation could do: stop lying.
On the night of March 24, 1989, the Exxon Valdez was not even supposed to leave harbor. Here’s why. Tankers are not allowed to sail unless unless a spill containment barge is operating nearby. That night, the barge was in dry-dock, locked under ice. Exxon kept that fact hidden, concealing the truth even after the tanker grounded. An Exxon official radioed the emergency crew, “Barge is on its way.” It wasn’t.
Had the barge been in operation, it would have surrounded the leaking ship with rubber skirts - and Paul’s home, and Alaska’s coast, would have been saved. But Exxon couldn’t wait for its oil.
Paul’s gone – buried with Exxon’s promises. But the oil’s still there. Go out to Chenega lands today. At Sleepy Bay, kick over some gravel and it will smell like a gas station.
Tort Tart
What the heck does this have to do with John McCain?
The Senator is what I’d call a ‘Tort Tart.’ Ken Lay’s “Law Suit Reform” posse was one of the fronts used by a gaggle of corporate lobbyists waging war on your day in court. Their rallying cry is ‘Tort Reform,’ by which they mean they want to take away the God-given right of any American, rich or poor, to sue the bastards who crush your child’s skull through product negligence, make your heart explode with a faulty medical device, siphon off your pension funds, or poison your food supply with spilled oil.
All of the Democratic candidates have seen through this ‘tort reform’ con – and so did a Senator named McCain who, in 2001, for example, voted for the Patients Bill of Rights allowing claims against butchers with scalpels. Then something happened to Senator McCain: the guy who stuck his neck out for litigants got his head chopped off when he ran for President in the Republican Party. One lobbyists’ website blasted McCain’s “go-it-alone moralism.”
So the Senator did what I call, The McCain Hunch. Again and again he grabbed his ankles and apologized to the K Street lobbyists, reversing his positions on, well, you name it. In 2001, he said of Bush’s tax cuts, “I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans.” Now, in bad conscience, the Senator vows to make these tax cuts permanent.
On “Tort Reform,” the about-face was dizzying. McCain voted to undermine his own 2001 Patients Bill of Rights with votes in 2005 to limit suits to enforce it. He then added his name to a bill that would have thrown sealhunter Kompkoff’s suit out of federal court.
In 2003, McCain voted against Bush’s Energy Plan, an industry oil-gasm. This week, following Exxon’s report that it sucked in $40.6 billion in earnings, the largest profit haul in planetary history, Senators Clinton, Obama and several others in both parties sponsored a bill to require a teeny sliver of oil industry super-profits go to alternative energy sources. Technically, it involved ending a $14 billion tax giveaway granted oil companies by the Bush Administration in 2004. Senator McCain wouldn’t support George and his oil patch buddies then. But now, Candidate McCain won’t back the repeal of this gawdawful tax break.
In this showdown with Big Oil, McCain is AWOL, missing in action.
Well, Paul, at least you were spared this.
I remember when I was on the investigation in Alaska, bankrupted fishermen, utterly ruined – Kompkoff’s co-plaintiffs in the suit before the Supreme Court – floated their soon-to-be repossessed boats into the tanker lanes with banners reading, “EXXON SUXX.”
To which they could now add, about a one-time stand-up Senator: “McCain duxx.”
M$ Admits Vista Is Crap
Rare honesty....
A Microsoft Corp. executive last year said the software company made a mistake by lowering the minimum technical requirements needed to run Windows Vista, a decision he said was made to help Intel Corp. meet its quarterly earnings, according to internal emails disclosed this week.Link.
The emails provide a glimpse into how Microsoft executives and hardware partners grappled with technical glitches and other problems as they prepared the long-awaited Windows Vista software for market. The emails were released as part of a federal class-action suit alleging that Microsoft's marketing program for Windows Vista misled consumers.
In several of the emails, Microsoft executives appear to be planning how they will explain to Microsoft Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner how a branding program implied that certain PCs were technically capable of running Windows Vista operating system when, in fact, they weren't. The emails also show how Microsoft executives struggled to respond to complaints from a Microsoft board member about technical problems he had encountered.
In the messages, Microsoft executives acknowledged they knew PCs with one set of Intel chips for handling PC graphics weren't able to handle some features Windows Vista. Microsoft included the product, Intel's 915 chip set, under a branding program called "Windows Vista Capable" that was designed to assure consumers that PCs they bought in 2006 would be able to run the operating system, which went on sale in early 2007.
In a note dated Feb. 26. 2007, Microsoft General Manager John Kalkman wrote that that "It was a mistake on our part to change the original graphics requirements." In the email, he added that "In the end, we lowered the requirement to help Intel make their quarterly earnings so they could continue to sell motherboards with 915 graphics embedded," according to a copy of the email.
Problems Microsoft was having with Intel appeared in emails over the past few years, including one dated Feb. 1, 2006, in which Microsoft senior director Mike Ybarra wrote "We are caving to Intel" and later complained that PC makers such as Hewlett-Packard Co. supported Microsoft, yet Microsoft was "allowing Intel to drive our consumer experience."
Intel disputed the statements about its finances, while declining to comment on its private communications with Microsoft. Chuck Mulloy, a spokesman for the chip maker, asserted that Mr. Kalkman "is not qualified in any shape or form to have knowledge about Intel's internal financial forecasts related to chipsets, motherboards or any other product."
A Microsoft spokesman said Mr. Kalkman and Mr. Ybarra would not be made available because the case is in active litigation. He added that the company included the Intel 915 chip set as part of the Windows Vista Capable program "based on successful testing of beta versions of Windows Vista on the chip set and the broad availability of the chip set in the market." Computers that use the Intel technology "were and are capable of being upgraded" to a version of the operating system called Windows Vista Home Basic, he said.
More broadly, Microsoft said in a statement that the emails addressed how company executives were trying to make the marketing program better for Microsoft partners and consumers. "That's the sort of exchange we want to encourage. And in the end, we believe we succeeded in achieving both objectives," the company said in the statement.
The contents of the emails were reported by publications that include the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Microsoft used the branding program to help spur PC sales in late 2006 prior to the roll-out of Windows Vista in January 2007. Microsoft and PC makers at the time feared that the coming release of Windows Vista would cause consumers to delay purchases of PCs during the 2006 year-end holiday selling season. The Vista-capable program was used to label PCs that had the technical specifications needed to run Windows Vista, which demands more memory, a faster processor and other features than earlier versions of Windows needed.
In an email addressed to Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer, Microsoft Board member John Shirley said that he didn't upgrade one of his PCs because Windows Vista didn't have the necessary software, known as a driver, to run his top-of-the-line Epson printer and two scanners. "I cannot understand with a product this long in creation why there is such a shortage of drivers," Mr. Shirley wrote.
In the class-action complaint, filed in March 2007, two consumers claimed that PCs they bought didn't have the appropriate technology to power Windows Vista, despite the Vista-capable logo that claimed they were.
Microsoft has disputed the allegations. "We believe the facts will show that Microsoft offered different versions of Windows Vista…to meet the varied needs of our customers purchasing computers at different price points," the company said in a statement.
Why It's Sort Of OK To Illegally Download Music Or At Least Fight The RIAA
By illegally downloading music, you screw the creators out of money. When the RIAA sues the crap out of you, they take your money and keep it for themselves and not the artists:
Despite collecting an estimated several hundred million dollars in P2P related settlements from the likes of Napster, KaZaA and Bolt, prominent artists’ managers are complaining that so far, they haven’t received any compensation from the labels. According to a lawyer, some are considering legal action.hat after legal bills were subtracted from the hundreds of millions in settlements, there wasn’t much left over to hand out.
When EMI, Universal Music and Warner music reached settlement agreements with the likes of Napster, KaZaA and Bolt, they collected hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation - money that was supposed to go to artists whose rights had been allegedly infringed upon when the networks were operating with unlicensed music.
Now, according to an article, the managers of some major artists are getting very impatient, as it appears the very people who were supposed to be compensated - the artists - haven’t received anything from the massive settlements. They say the cash - estimated to be as much as $400m - hasn’t filtered through to their clients and understandably they’re getting very impatient.
Lawyer John Branca, who has represented the likes of The Rolling Stones and Korn, said: “Artist managers and lawyers have been wondering for months when their artists will see money from the copyright settlements and how it will be accounted for.”
Indicating the levels of impatience with the big labels holding the money he added: “Some of them are even talking about filing lawsuits if they don’t get paid soon.”
Of course, EMI, Universal and Warner have a different take on the delay, with sources suggesting that it’s down to the difficulties in deciding who gets what money, based on the levels of copyright infringement for each individual group or artist.
A recording industry on the back foot having spent most of its time fighting the digital revolution rather than becoming part of it, is clearly trying to hang on to every penny, even when it comes to compensating the artists who they claim they were defending by taking legal action in the first place.
Irving Azoff, who manages Christina Aguilera, The Eagles, Van Halen, REO Speedwagon and Seal (amongst others) says it’s hard for artists to get what they deserve from the labels: “They will play hide and seek, but eventually will be forced to pay something,” he said. “The record companies have even tried to credit unrecouped accounts. It’s never easy for an artist to get paid their fair share.”
Typically, the labels see it a different way. An EMI spokeperson said that it was “sharing proceeds from the Napster and Kazaa settlements with artists and writers whose work was infringed upon” while Warner’s said the label is “sharing the Napster settlement with its recording artists and songwriters, and at this stage nearly all settlement monies have been disbursed.”
The Universal spokesman spoke only of the label’s ‘policy’ of sharing “its portion of various settlements with its artists, regardless of whether their contracts require it” with no mention of whether it had actually done this or not.
But typically, when money is involved, things start to get murky. The same sources who suggested the reasons for the delay in making payments are also suggesting that there might not be much money to even give to the artists.
It’s being claimed t
Scariest News Stories Of 27 February
Neither Dem nor Beloved Leader know very much about the world they effectively want to lead:
Hilary and O:
The questions, though, are: What does The Saint know about the next Russian president? Or how little does he know, if anything?
Hilary and O:
Near the end of Tuesday night’s Democratic debate between Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, one of the moderators, Tim Russert of NBC News, tossed up a jump ball. “What can you tell me about the man who’s going to be Mr. Putin’s successor?”Beloved Leader:
Mr. Obama looked expectantly at Mrs. Clinton, who grabbed for the ball. “Well,” she said with a chuckle, “I can tell you that he’s a hand-picked successor, that he is someone who is obviously being installed by Putin, who Putin can control, who has very little independence, the best we know.”
Partial credit.
Mr. Russert pressed on. “Who will it be? Do you know his name?”
“Um, Medved ——,” Mrs. Clinton began. “Medvedova, whatever.”
Close.
That would be Dmitri A. Medvedev, a 42-year-old former lawyer and high-ranking bureaucrat who is expected to be ratified by voters on Sunday as the next president of Russia.
A look of relief spread over Mr. Obama’s face. Mr. Russert asked him what he knew about the Russian president-to-be.
“Well, the — I think Senator Clinton speaks accurately about him,” Mr. Obama said. “He is somebody who was handpicked by Putin. Putin has been very clear that he will continue to have the strongest hand in Russia in terms of running the government.”
Bush was asked at a news conference about the future of one of the nation's most important foreign relationships, one that has been increasingly troubled. He said he, too, was eager for insights into "how Russia intends to conduct foreign policy after Vladimir Putin's presidency. And I can't answer the question yet."Of course, Beloved Leader still has to learn about the absence of WMDs in Iraq.
The questions, though, are: What does The Saint know about the next Russian president? Or how little does he know, if anything?
Hav-A-Laff!
Yes, I know I'm the only one in the world who doesn't watch TV and relies on the web instead. Of course, I get less bullshit in my news and views but I miss stuff like this:
Thursday, February 28, 2008
McCain Did Not Screw Iseman
As Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain twisted briefly in the wind kicked up by that New York Times story suggesting he had swapped political favors for the personal favors of an attractive lobbyist for the telecommunications industry, I kept waiting for the public policy punch line. Surely the Times would spell out just what it was that McCain had delivered to big media beyond what the paper originally reported: an all-too-typical congressional request that the FCC speed up its review of a broadcast licensing dispute.Link.
Vicki Iseman, the lobbyist in question, is praised on her company’s Web site for her “extensive experience in telecommunications, representing corporations before the House and Senate Commerce Committees,” and for “her work on the landmark 1992 and 1996 communications bills.” Now that’s a biggie, because the 1996 legislation, although you would never have learned this from the mainstream media at the time, opened the floodgates for massive media consolidation, thus rewarding media moguls for their many millions in campaign contributions. McCain was a big player on that Commerce Committee at the time, and I expected a Times revelation as to just how Iseman got McCain to help gift the media barons with their dream legislation.
The revelation never came, because the annoying reality is that McCain was one of the rare Senate opponents of the telecom bill that Iseman was pushing—as opposed to The New York Times, which like every other major media outlet pushed for the legislation (in the case of the Times, without ever conceding its own corporation’s financial bias in the matter). McCain was one of five senators (and the sole Republican) who, along with Democrats Russ Feingold, Patrick Leahy, Paul Simon and the great Paul Wellstone, voted against the atrocious legislation, which President Bill Clinton signed into law.
The Times, which now has the temerity to question McCain’s integrity on telecommunications policy, ran a shameful editorial back then, under the headline “A Victory for Viewers,” insisting after the passage of the legislation that “there was one clear winner—the consumer.” Seven years later, the paper’s “Editorial Observer,” Brent Staples, bemoaned one direct consequence of the passage of the Telecom Act, under the title “The Trouble with Corporate Radio: The Day the Protest Music Died.” Noting that “corporate ownership has changed what gets played—and who plays it,” Staples observed that the top two radio owners went from having a total of 115 stations before the act was passed to 1,400 between them afterward.
This concentration of ownership in all media was the inevitable result of the legislation that the media moguls sought. That far-reaching impact was obvious only one year after the act’s passage, as Neil Hickey noted at the time in the Columbia Journalism Review: “ ... Far and away the splashiest effect of the new law during the last year has been the historic, unprecedented torrent of mergers, consolidations, buyouts, partnerships and joint ventures that has changed the face of Big Media in America.” He then offers a staggering list of massive multibillion-dollar mergers consummated during that first year.
One of the early winners was Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., which quickly became the biggest owner of television stations, bolstering its lineup of media properties such as TV Guide, HarperCollins and Twentieth Century Fox; quite a gift from legislation signed by President Clinton, which perhaps explains the warm relationship that subsequently developed between Murdoch and Hillary Clinton. Murdoch sponsored a fundraiser for Clinton’s senatorial re-election campaign in 2006, but when asked during the Iowa primary about Murdoch’s vast media holdings, including Fox News, the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, Clinton ducked the question. Avoiding any reference to Murdoch, she conceded that “… There have been a lot of media consolidations in the last several years, and it is quite troubling.”
It’s not easy to maintain an evenhanded appraisal of McCain as he appropriates the Bush mantle. Of course, I wouldn’t vote for him; he is willing to let the Iraq war go on for a hundred years and, at the rate of at least $200 billion a year, that makes a mockery of his efforts to defeat earmarks and other wasteful government spending—beginning with the massive waste in the Pentagon budget that he has done so much to expose. His capitulation on President Bush’s use of torture is even more appalling. But it is absurd to attempt to pigeonhole McCain as a patsy for corporate lobbyists when he has been in the forefront of key efforts to challenge their power.
The Cost Of The Iraq Fandango: $3 TRILLION
The figure explained and how it could be better spent is here.
GOP Leaders: The King Of Penis Enlargements
Folks often joke about the blood-sucking parasites that infect politics, but the gibes about politicians and lobbyists are usually just that — jokes. Yet the charge gets uncomfortably close to being literal when discussing former South Dakota lieutenant governor and potential Senate candidate Steve Kirby.[more (emphasis added)]
Following the sale of his prominent Sioux Falls family’s surety bond company, Kirby branched out into more exotic business terrain when he founded Bluestern Venture Capital in 1992. Among Bluestern’s portfolio companies was a Massachusetts-based biotech firm called Collagenesis — a company whose business model couldn’t have been more foreign to the stolid world of South Dakota surety bonding.
Collagenesis specialized in processing donated skin off cadavers into cosmetic surgery products, and was subject to a blistering five-part investigative series by the Orange County Register beginning on April 17, 2000. “Burn victims lie waiting in hospitals as nurses scour the country for skin to cover their wounds, even though skin is in plentiful supply for plastic surgeons,” read the lede of the Register report. “The skin they need to save their lives is being used instead for procedures that could wait: supporting bladders, erasing laugh lines and enlarging penises.”
Quote Du Jour
Politics: A strife of interests masquerading as a contest of principles. The conduct of public affairs for private advantage. -- Ambrose Bierce
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Signs That She's Lost
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