More thoughts on lying and loyalty by David Wessel in, of all places, The Wall Street Journal (subscription required):

Bill Clinton lied about Monica Lewinsky. But this administration seems particularly proud of its skill in misleading the press, the public and Congress, when convenient. It has even hired Elliot Abrams and John Poindexter, both of whom were convicted of lying to Congress about Reagan-era aid to Nicaraguan rebels. (Mr. Abrams was pardoned. Mr. Poindexter's conviction was overturned because prosecutors relied on testimony provided under immunity granted by Congress.)

A White House aide who had told me one thing on the record a few weeks ago tried to persuade me over the weekend, not for attribution, that the opposite was true. I protested. His reply: "Why would I lie? Because that's what I'm supposed to do. Lying to the press doesn't prick anyone's conscience."

Now that's candor.

Political loyalty and message discipline aren't ends in themselves. Politics is not just a sport. It matters. Differences over economic policy aren't just about whether the Republican team wins or loses to the Democratic team. They are about the best way to use the power of government to see that our children and grandchildren live better than we do.

It's bad enough when your opponents exercise power they're earned. But when they abuse power they haven't earned except through nepotism and chicanery, the result is the destruction of American ideals and a basic disrespect for the people and institutions � including the press � that make this country great.

In keeping with the all-politics, all-the-time characterization, the rush to distance itself from the fundamental racism of its own party reveals Junior's administration for what it is: a hollow lie from the bratty son of another one-term liar elected by playing the racism card way back in 1988.

Link via Altercation.

{ 9:20 AM }

.

You ain't see cold yet according to an AP story on Yahoo:

Charities, utilities and government agencies across the country are reporting a surge in the number of people asking for help paying their heating bills, even as the Bush administration proposes a $300 million cut in the nation's biggest source of home heating aid.

The White House has requested $1.4 billion for the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, compared with $1.7 billion last year. Congress hasn't decided whether to adopt the cut, but critics said the proposal comes at the worst possible time.

Cutting the money could affect more than 500,000 people who rely on aid to pay utility bills, according to the National Energy Assistance Director's Association, which represents state officials who administer LIHEAP grants.

"They will either shut their program early, when they run out of money, or cut benefits," spokesman Mark Wolfe said. "It is colder than last year. Unemployment is higher ... We are starting to hear from some states that their caseloads are going up."

Heat for me but not for thee... This is compassionate conservatism in action. Perhaps we should encourage the poor to move to a warmer climate like Texas, where we can more easily incarcerate and kill them.

2002 will be colder than 2001, and every year thereafter will be still colder until we throw the energy industry out of the White House.

{ 12:31 PM }

.

The path to faith-based hell. From The New York Times:

President Bush is enacting by executive fiat key pieces of his divisive "faith-based initiative,'' including one that lets federal contractors use religious favoritism in their hiring. [...]

Joe Conn, a spokesman for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, said religious groups would be allowed to discriminate in hiring while other groups could not.

"It's not equal treatment,'' he said. "It's special treatment for religious groups. ... In essence, the government is going to be funding religious discrimination.'"

Divisive indeed. Junior's a divider, not a uniter, as head of HR for the American Christian Taliban.

{ 11:19 AM }

.

Time to retire the formula. What would Jesus drive? Who would Jesus lynch? Who would Jesus impeach? Which sodomy laws would Jesus enforce? Which loans to corporate insiders would Jesus forgive? Which 401(k) plans would Jesus save? Which people would Jesus bomb unilaterally? Which blogs does Jesus read? Does Jesus have any insider Super Bowl 2003 tips? Which senators should Jesus allow to live into their second century of decrepitude?

I feel the spirit move me. Let's join hands � it's what Jesus would do. Get on your knees and pray with me now. Lift your voice to heaven and say it with me, say it with feeling, let it come out of your heart and soul just like the bumper sticker says: "Oh God, please protect me from your followers."

{ 10:00 AM }

.

"The American Civil Liberties Union of Washington today [12/10/02] said it is offering free legal advice to booksellers in the state who receive subpoenas or search warrants seeking disclosure of customer purchase records. [...]

"The ACLU�s action comes in response to the USA PATRIOT Act, which has given federal law enforcement agencies new tools to demand records from booksellers. Passed in 2001, the PATRIOT Act empowers the government to obtain records of a person�s book purchases as part of an intelligence investigation, without evidence that the buyer is suspected of committing a crime.

"In recent years, there has been an increase in subpoenas to bookstores demanding evidence about customers� reading habits. In one notable incident, Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr demanded that Barnes & Noble and Kramerbooks in Washington, DC divulge information regarding all purchases by Monica Lewinsky. Booksellers in Washington state, ranging in size from Amazon.com to the small Arundel Books in Seattle, have received subpoenas to disclose customer records."

Given the amount of Amazon and other bookselling that takes place through blog referral commerce, and the extensive electronic identity residues that remain, it makes sense for every person who reads or writes a blog to support the efforts of the ACLU.

Noted at the invaluable TalkLeft.

{ 9:37 AM }

.

Technical difficulties with the USA, via Boing Boing.

{ 3:44 PM }

.

"Yeah. Right. I mean, who cares what my political opinion is? My politics don't mean anything. Nobody's politics on the internet do. It's a black hole of prose and opinion."

�Neal Pollack, interviewed in Bookslut.

{ 2:27 PM }

.

Contrasting views of Yemen, North Korea, and Iraq. In today's New York Times, we see that a Stalinist state with a nuclear weapons program has apparently shipped Scud missiles to Yemen:

North Korea recently disclosed that it has a program to make nuclear weapons from highly enriched uranium, in violation of its international agreements, but the United States has taken pains to defuse any sense that it is planning an immediate confrontation over the issue. That policy is in contrast to the administration's approach with Iraq, where the Bush administration has threatened military action to disarm President Saddam Hussein if he does not voluntarily dispose of any weapons of mass destruction.

To qualify the distinction between its posture on Iraq and North Korea, it stands to reason that either (1) the administration has specific material evidence against Iraq that it refuses to share with UN weapons inspectors, leading them and the rest of the world as well as the American people on a wild goose chase, or (2) the administration is pursuing a secret agenda of its own, probably related to the needs of the energy industry and the legacy of Bush presidencies.

In another article, we learn that Yemen is our "friend and partner":

Asked if Yemen was a state that sponsors terrorism, [White House spokesman Scott] McClellan said: "No ... We now know that in fact Yemen has been a friend and partner in the global war on terrorism.''

And yet Richard Clarke, NSC Coordinator for Counterterrorism, 1992-2001, feels otherwise, in a report from Frontline:

I think there were two things going on in Yemen [in the FBI investigation following the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole]. The first thing was the government of Yemen didn't want us to know all the details; in part, because that would reveal that some low-level people in the Yemeni government may have been part of the conspiracy; in part, because it would have shown that the Yemeni government didn't really have control over a large section of Yemen; in part because it would have shown that Yemen was filled with terrorists from a whole variety of different organizations. So Yemen didn't want to cooperate fully, didn't want us to see everything that was there.

The other thing that was going on was that you had an U.S. ambassador [Barbara K. Bodine] who wanted to be fully in control of everything that every American official did in the country, and resented the fact that suddenly there were hundreds of FBI personnel in the country and only a handful of State Department personnel. She wanted good relations with Yemen as the number one priority.

[FBI counterterrorism expert] John O'Neill wanted to stop terrorism as the number one priority, and the two conflicted. Almost all of us who were following the details in Washington, whether we were in the Justice Department, the FBI, the White House, State Department, the Defense Department -- almost all of us thought that John O'Neill was doing the right thing.

From the same set of interviews, we hear the following from Clint Guenther, Former FBI Agent NYC � Counterterrorism:

Q: Now we know the connections. There were connections between some of the individuals there in Yemen and the Malaysian meetings and some of the [9/11] hijackers. There were dots to be connected. What did we lose by, months before 9/11, having to pull out the best people [O'Neill's team] to investigate the case, having to pull them out of Yemen?

A: That's hard to say, what we lost. We could've lost a lot. We could've lost the intelligence that could've connected that dot to the World Trade Center. I don't know that to be a fact, but a lot of the Al Qaeda people are coming out of Yemen. A lot of the Yemenis are involved. I think if we could have had better investigative effort over there, had been able to build the confidence of the local law enforcement, we may have been able to find people, interrogate them, and get a lot more intelligence that would have shown us something going on.

In its so-called war on "terror," the administration protects Yemen and Saudi Arabia, ignores North Korea, and mobilizes all of its resources against Iraq.

Could this make any less sense? There is no doubt that there are real threats facing this country, and that the administration has yet to demonstrate it is remotely capable of addressing them.

{ 12:37 PM }

.

Why so many middle aged antiwar protesters? Because we still remember the draft.

Pat Elder, who owns a real estate title company in Bethesda, Md., says he got involved with a Quaker group after attending an anti-war protest in October.

"A third of the people there were over 50 and I thought, "Jesus, man, that's not what I remember from Vietnam. I'm 47 and I was a teenager when the big Vietnam demos were going on."

Now, he said, it merges "the person in the suburbs, the conservative crowd and the traditional activists ... to strike a tone that is more palatable to middle America. So we're not 20-year-olds in bandanas, shouting that Bush is a bastard."

Not a bastard, really, more of an overprivileged, underachieving chickenhawk, wouldn't you say? [From the Toronto Star.]

{ 4:18 PM }

.

Revolutionizing fuel � and fueling the revolution.

Hydrogen is the most basic and ubiquitous element in the universe. It never runs out and produces no harmful CO2 emissions when burned; the only byproducts are heat and pure water. That is why it's been called "the forever fuel."

Hydrogen has the potential to end the world's reliance on oil. Switching to hydrogen and creating a decentralized power grid would also be the best assurance against terrorist attacks aimed at disrupting the national power grid and energy infrastructure. Moreover, hydrogen power will dramatically reduce carbon dioxide emissions and mitigate the effects of global warming. [�]

In a hydrogen economy the centralized, top-down flow of energy, controlled by global oil companies and utilities, would become obsolete. Instead, millions of end users would connect their fuel cells into local, regional and national hydrogen energy webs (HEWs), using the same design principles and smart technologies that made the World Wide Web possible. Automobiles with hydrogen cells would be power stations on wheels, each with a generating capacity of 20 kilowatts. Since the average car is parked most of the time, it can be plugged in, during nonuse hours, to the home, office or the main interactive electricity network. Thus, car owners could sell electricity back to the grid. If just 25 percent of all US cars supplied energy to the grid, all the power plants in the country could be eliminated. [�]

The global energy and utility companies will make every effort to control access to this new, decentralized energy network just as software, telecommunications and content companies like Microsoft and AOL Time Warner have attempted to control access to the World Wide Web.

Jeremy Rifkin in The Nation. Via Cursor.

{ 12:43 PM }

.

CSX effective tax rate (1998-2001): �17.5%. "If the President�s goal is to encourage even more corporate tax sheltering, then Mr. Snow looks like a fine choice to help him do so," said Robert S. McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice.

Here's their report showing that, instead of paying taxes, CSX supplemented its $934 million in pretax U.S. profits over the four years with a total of $164 million in tax rebate checks from the federal government. Noted at Eric Alterman's Altercation.

{ 10:50 AM }

.

Secrets of Dick, Bush and Lay. The puppet court has spoken (story in the Washington Post):

The 40-page opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, in the suit brought by the General Accounting Office against Vice President Cheney*, ruled that the GAO, which conducts hundreds of investigations into government affairs each year, has no personal or institutional right to bring almost any suit. Analysts said this means the agency might face trouble in enforcing its requests for information from any federal department. [...]

The case was randomly assigned to Bates, who was appointed to the bench by President Bush last year. [...]

"[A] Republican judge has decided that, once in office, Bush and Cheney can operate in complete secrecy with no oversight by Congress," [Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.)] said.

The score is Walking Cadaver 1, GAO 0. But keep your eye on Judicial Watch's lawsuit against the Cheney Energy Task Force.

*For the issues surrounding these events: "Wednesday, January 9, 2002 � The White House told Congress in a letter released yesterday that Vice President Cheney or his aides met six times with Enron Corp. representatives last year, including a session two months before the energy trading company made the largest corporate bankruptcy filing in American history. [...] One of the staff meetings occurred six days before Enron announced actions that reduced its shareholder equity by $1.2 billion.

"Cheney met for half an hour on April 17 with Kenneth L. Lay, Enron's chairman, according to a Jan. 3 letter by David S. Addington, the vice president's counsel. The letter was written in response to a Dec. 4 request by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), ranking minority member of the House Committee on Government Reform, who released the correspondence." {link}

{ 10:25 AM }

.

How does the estate tax repeal affect the personal finances of presidential candidates? Let's assume George H W Bush dies in 2010, the year of peak benefits for the wealthy under Junior's tax "reform" legislation of last year (EGTRRA) that he hopes to make permanent.

What kind of personal financial benefit can Junior expect? How much money will he see from Daddy's activities with The Carlyle Group, etc.? Can we compare Junior's "death tax" scenario against the inheritance scenarios of other presidential candidates, and can the resulting scandalous disproportionality become a factor in campaigns against him and his dynastic policies? Discuss.

{ 9:43 AM }

.

Is the David Keene who is Chairman of the African American Republican Leadership Council (noted at Talking Points Memo) the same David A. Keene who spawned the Parkway BMW gunman we wrote about last week?

We haven't seen nearly enough "overreaction" to the routinely bigoted, violent rantings that emanate from the right. (TPM link from Atrios.)

{ 9:24 AM }

.

What kind of revival was that again?

According to the blurb for Six Steps to Spiritual Revival, the Christian Coalition's Pat Robertson "reveals an amazing Scriptural pattern". But there's a pretty amazing pattern emerging amongst buyers of his book on Amazon.com. [...] Scrolling down, you can see that a number of users have recommended The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Men in addition to, or as an alternative to Robertson's tome.

Found at The Register, via Moby Lives.

{ 4:34 PM }

.

Jeffrey Toobin's profile of proto-candidate and Republican suckup Joe Lieberman in The New Yorker:

Intentionally or not, Lieberman spent the fall doing the Republicans' bidding. His stature gave the President's policy on Iraq the shimmer of bipartisanship; his leadership on homeland security led to a political debacle and policy failure for the Democrats. (After the election, the final version of the bill, which Lieberman voted for, basically adopted the President's position.) I asked him whether he was uncomfortable serving simultaneously as a punching bag and a cheerleader for the Bush White House. "It's odd," he said without emotion. "It happens in politics."

Al Gore created not just one presidential monster (by botching the post-election campaign) but possibly two with his lousy choice of running mate, another faith-based hypocrite.

{ 3:29 PM }

.

Further explorations in the bottomless pit of Enron.

According to the affidavit, [former CFO] Fastow used his own children and wife as conduits for questionable payments that he himself was afraid to accept. Former friend and Enron subordinate [Michael] Kopper, who has already pleaded guilty to two counts of conspiracy in the Enron scandal, claimed the routine was just part of a Fastow special gifts program.

"To disguise the nature of the payments," reported [FBI special] agent [Omer J.] Meisel, "Fastow instructed Kopper to establish a 'gifting program,' whereby Kopper and his domestic partner [William Dodson] made annual gifts of $10,000 to individual Fastow family members." Even as he was constructing special partnerships that the government and the Securities and Exchange Commission claim broke numerous accounting rules, Fastow was mindful of IRS guidelines.

The $10,000 amount was chosen because gifts of up to that amount to an individual in one year are not required to be reported and are excluded from taxable income. In order to skim kickbacks from the various partnerships, the government claims, Fastow made his own family the mules for the illicit payments.

"Fastow instructed Kopper that he and his domestic partner should write checks not only to Fastow but also to Fastow's wife and two children," according to the affidavit. "Fastow told Kopper that, if ever asked, they could explain the checks from Kopper by saying he and Fastow were very close friends and the checks were gifts." On December 31, 1998, Kopper wrote two $10,000 checks to Fastow's children and one for $19,724 to his wife. The goodies over two years totaled $125,000.

From Houston Press.

{ 2:33 PM }

.

"The suspect charged in connection with a deliberately set fire at the River Oaks home once owned by former Enron executive [CFO] Andrew Fastow is at LBJ Hospital recovering from a jail cell suicide attempt Sunday," says today's Houston Chronicle.

Add that to Vice Chairman's J. Clifford Baxter's death which was ruled a suicide but may actually have been something more sinister. Reminders as to who he was:

"Cliff Baxter complained mightily to (then-CEO Jeff) Skilling and all who would listen about the inappropriateness of our transactions with LJM," Sherron Watkins wrote. LJM is one of the partnerships apparently used to keep a half-billion dollars in losses off Enron's books. The same letter warned, "We will implode in a wave of accounting scandals" unless Enron changes its practices. [...]

[Baxter] Sold 577,436 shares for $35.2 million.

Awful lot of fishy "suicides" floating around the Enron folk. Twice as many as Vince Foster as of today. Looks like Junior's friends are blurring the lines between Texan good ol' boy networks and The Sopranos.

{ 1:42 PM }

.

"Religion, like bad poetry and vacation photos, should be kept to oneself. If you have a personal relationship with your god, good for you. It will save us both a lot of time if you keep it to yourself because, like a lot of people, I'm not interested and I just don't feel like being polite about it anymore."

Three cheers to TBOGG, commenting on the Stachowicz murder in Chicago.

{ 1:01 PM }

.

The Washington Post goes hiking in Utah, in the very same wilderness threatened by the Junior's administration.

{ 12:53 PM }

.

This Just In. "Venetian Snares Hard at Work on Creating Entire Full-Length CD from His Own Sex Sounds," according to Pitchfork.

{ 12:41 PM }

.

Kerry-McCain? Last week I half-jokingly remarked about the viability of a Kerry-McCain (or vice versa) ticket as a wake-up call to both parties, in a comment thread on Ruminate This*.

The synchronized character of a two-party shake-up has become even more appealing upon further reflection. Third-party tickets tend to hurt one party or the other, but with a candidate from each side such a ticket could hurt both at once, and would send a message to both the Republican and Democratic parties that their old tricks are not working anymore. We the People really need political and legislative solutions to actual problems, not just smokescreens and demonization.

That is, of course, only if we're still bothering with such formalities as elections in 2004.

*The only blog with a nice Dubuffet graphic in the masthead.

{ 9:40 AM }

.

How to rape the American Northwest.

The sky is pierced by snow-painted pines, their craggy trunks pre-dating the existence of the United States by centuries.

But now a new feature marks the landscape � the barren 'clear-cuts', where the trees have been felled. They appear like scars, slashed across what would otherwise be the most awesome landscape in America; wastelands gouged into what were once forest but are now huge stretches of castrated tree trunks and the debris of destruction.

They are a picture of the future as the lumber industry, after years of restraint by rules and protective regulations, is unleashed by new regulations, announced last week by the administration of George Bush, giving managers of America's 155 national forests rights to approve the exploitation of the land they control � primarily logging and mining.

Ed Vulliamy in The Observer (UK).

{ 3:08 PM }

.