The good news about war

Sam Smith

There is some good news. This is the first time in modern history that the American public has gotten its leaders to back off on their war plans - at least for a while.

Even if not permanent, what has happened in the past few days has been extraordinary. But, although we don't talk about it, this achievement didn't come out of nowhere. Quietly, and without media or official admission, our approach to war has been changing for some time. And as the charts below show the change has been dramatic.

The nature of war has also changed dramatically, symbolized by, among other things, the increased use of drones that - capricious, illegal and deadly as they may be - don't come close to another Normandy Invasion, Battle of the Sommes or even the Vietnam war.

And it is hard to conceive, in earlier times, of an American leader promising in defense of an attack on a country that it will "unbelievably small."

Yet if you look at frequency rather than casualties, there is a different story. One of a country obsessed with throwing its weight around in foreign lands even if the results - including nearly three dozen bombing attacks since World War II - have been overwhelmingly stunning failures. While less deadly, America seems more war prone.

But contrary to what the media and the rest of the establishment tell you, the general public is sometimes ahead of its leaders. Consider the the drop in births, in a part a voluntary understanding of the risks and costs of excessive children. Or popularly driven ecological issues such as recycling and local food. Or, in the case of war, the successful elimination of a military draft, now about four decades ago. Just consider how little the draft is even mentioned these days.

The revolt against American involvement in Syria is an off spring of the end of the draft and the lessons we learned about war in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. It reflects a public that has lost its enthusiasm for war, and for some extremely good reasons such as the examples our leaders have forced upon us in recent years.

So why do we keep having wars? There are several reasons

- War has moved from being a matter of conquest to one of control. As our industries increasingly move offshore, our politician feel compelled to protect their campaign contributors even if they are also economic deserters. If you think of the world not in terms of countries but of markets, if ou want safe pipelines and not colonies, the nature of war changes dramatically. For example, we do not invade countries with tens of thousands of troops, but we have between 700 and 800 bases in over a 100 foreign lands.

- Because the nature of war has changed the level of elite paranoia in this country has increased dramatically. I mentioned this some time back in connection with the Boston bombings:

Writing in US News about the Boston bombing, Paul Shinkman notes, "Law enforcement officials believed it was only a matter of time before the improvised explosive devices that have defined the conflict in Afghanistan, Iraq and even Northern Ireland would be used against Americans on their home soil."

A few months ago, I was talking with a friend who had fought in the Battle of the Bulge, the major WWII conflict that killed 19,000 Americans, wounded 47,000 others and left 23,000 missing or captured. He noted that he felt great sympathy with American troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. I asked him to elaborate and he said that when the soldiers of his era left the battlefield, they also left the danger for awhile. In Iraq and Afghanistan there was no such relief. All you had to do was walk down the block and an IED might explode.

The melding of domestic law enforcement and military behavior is not accidental. In the minds of our leaders we are in perpetual conflict.

- Finally, wars are the stimulus package for the biggest slice of our budget: the Pentagon and its contractors. The industrial-military complex is America's largest recipient of welfare and the only one that the conservatives don't attack. There is no longer any real military strategy, just military subsidies.

It will probably take decades to wear the practice of war down significantly further, but we should at least be cheered by the fact that the people of this land have shown that can scare Obama and Kerry as much as can Assad and Putin.

Think of war as the slavery of the 21st century and recall what a long struggle that predecessor required to finally collapse.

Meanwhile, don't let anyone tell you it's just up to the White House or Congress. Progress comes from us despite their objections.

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AFL-CIO adopts major new approach to labor organizing

In a big change from past decades, the AFL-CIO has formally adopted an approach to labor organizing that the Progressive Review recommended as far back as 1995: organizing non-union as well as union workers. An early Review piece on this topic follows this story:
 
AFL-CIO - Today, in a culmination of months of listening sessions and reflection, the AFL-CIO announced that any U.S. worker can join the labor movement and that the labor federation will develop several new pathways for workers to join the labor movement, either through affiliate unions, AFL-CIO's community affiliate Working America, worker centers or as students.

To start growing the labor movement again, delegates at the AFL-CIO Convention passed a resolution calling for a more broad and inclusive labor movement that is not confined within bargaining units that are not defined by workers themselves and limited by unscrupulous employers. The AFL-CIO is going to expand existing forms of participation in the labor movement and create new forms of membership that are available to any workers not already covered by a collective bargaining agreement or who are not members of unions or represented by unions.

The AFL-CIO is inviting workers to join the labor movement by joining one of the federation's affiliates or through Working America. AFL-CIO will work together with the affiliates and Working America to develop new forms of workplace representation and advocacy that help members outside of collective bargaining units, seek to extend non-collectively bargained benefits to those members, educate and train new members and mobilize new members in electoral and political efforts.

The second major avenue for expanding the labor movement is for the AFL-CIO to expand its associations with worker centers, particularly in ways that don't undermine other unions and collective bargaining agreements. The federation also will work to find opportunities for worker center members to become union members.

Finally, in recognizing that students are not only the future of much of the workforce, they also have vital interests in making sure that workplaces are fair and just, the AFL-CIO is going to authorize Working America to create a student membership, expand their work with campus-based student organizations, advocate for issues of importance to students and work to make sure that student workers have the ability to exercise their right to organize and collectively bargaining.

 Progressive Review, 1995 - There are actually things we can do to moderate the ill-effects of these megasystems. We could, for example, regenerate the spirit of populism, the one native American movement that understood and challenged the industrial revolution's assault on freedom. We could, for example, start treating our largest corporations more like public utilities, demanding, as we did once, that they function in the public interest, convenience and necessity. We could press for real anti-trust enforcement, for public members on the boards of large companies and elected corporate regulatory commissions. We could create an American Association of Working People -- modeled more on the AARP than on the AFL-CIO -- to organize the masses of non-unionized employees of America into an effective political lobby. We could create state and city banks, countering the redlining of America's financial institutions by providing loans to excluded home-buyers and small businesses. And we could encourage as public policy the growth of cooperatives and community or worker owned companies. In short, we could finally recognize that much of today's political struggle is not between conservatives and liberals, but between corporatism and democracy.

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Travon Martin medical examiner files $100 million lawsuit

WFTV, FL - Dr. Shiping Bao's testimony raised eyebrows during the George Zimmerman trial.

"I believe it is my opinion that Trayvon Martin was in a lot of pain, and that he was suffering," [medical exaiminer] Bao said July 5 during testimony in the George Zimmerman trial.

On the stand, Dr. Bao changed his testimony about key statements he'd made and said he'd changed his mind about Martin only being alive for as many as three minutes after the shooting.

"I believe he was alive one to 10 minutes after he was shot. His heart was beating until there was no blood left," Bao said.

Dr. Bao is dropping another bombshell -- his attorney is preparing a $100 million lawsuit.

Through his high-profile attorney, he claims the medical examiner, state attorney's office, and Sanford Police Department were all biased against Martin.

"He says their general attitude was that he got what he deserved," Attorney Willie Gary told Channel 9.

Gary said Dr. Bao was made to be a scapegoat and was wrongfully fired from the medical examiner's office. He said his client was prepared to offer proof that Martin was not the aggressor.

"He was in essence told to zip his lips. 'Shut up. Don't say those things,'" Gary said.

Gary said prosecutors never asked Dr. Bao a question crucial to their case.

"He wanted a question that would have allowed him to explain to the jury with scientific evidence how there was no way Trayvon Martin could have been on top of George Zimmerman," Gary said.

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Bookshelf: Confessions of a Guerilla Writer

Dan Moldea and I don't agree on Vince Foster's death or Bill Clinton, but other than that, he was one of the niftiest and most independent people I met in my years in Washington. I guess covering the mob teaches you to watch your back instead of just republishing press statements - Sam Smith

An excerpt from Confessions of a Guerilla Writer by Dan Moldea

My dad and my great-grandfather both died at 64. And my grandfather died just one month into his 65th year. I am now midway through 63, and I have a lot of explaining to do. . .

For most of my adult life, I worked as a fiercely independent investigative journalist who concentrated on investigations of organized crime--a really stupid way to make a living. . . .

Although my career-long obsession revolves around the 1975 disappearance of former Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa, I was the first reporter to present the case that Hoffa-along with Carlos Marcello, the boss of the New Orleans Mafia, and Santo Trafficante, the Mafia boss of Tampa-had arranged and executed the murder of President John Kennedy in 1963, "a straight mob hit."

A year after I revealed this in my 1978 book, The Hoffa Wars, the U.S. House Select Committee on Assassinations released its final report, insisting that Hoffa, Marcello and Trafficante had the "motive, means and opportunity" to kill the President. The chief counsel of the committee flatly stated, "The mob did it. It's a historical fact."

My subsequent news-breaking books about the contract killing of an Ohio businessman (1983), the Mafia's penetration of Hollywood (1986), and the influence of organized crime in professional football (1989) were equally controversial but also led to wider investigations.

With regard to my 1995 book about the 1968 murder of Senator Robert Kennedy, I did conclude that the LAPD had arrested the right man. But, because of all the police errors, the existing evidence gave critics of the official investigation ample opportunity to claim that the senator had been killed by a conspiracy. In the end, twenty-seven years later, I solved that case-because, for the first time, I explained what the LAPD could not: Why the crime-scene evidence had given the illusion that two guns had been fired-when, in fact, Sirhan Sirhan, whom I interviewed extensively, had acted alone.

I later wrote  books concluding that football star O. J. Simpson had also acted alone when he allegedly killed his ex-wife in 1994 and that Deputy White House Counsel Vincent Foster had acted alone when he committed suicide in 1993. I published those books in 1997 and 1998, respectively.

In what many considered an act of journalistic heresy--apart from my 1990-1994 landmark libel suit against the New York Times, the newspaper that created, destroyed, and then resurrected me--I served as Larry Flynt's lead investigator for eight weeks during his highly publicized crusade to expose President Bill Clinton's enemies who had conflicting standards of private behavior for public officials: one for those they like, and another for those they don't like.

More on Dan Moldea

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Top campaign purchasers of Congress

From Mother Jones


1 AT&T
2 National Association of Realtors
3 Goldman Sachs
4 American Association for Justice
5 Citigroup
6 American Medical Association
7 National Automobile Dealers Association
8 United Parcel Service
9 Altria

More top donors

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NSA shares American citizens' phone calls & emails with Israel

Glenn Greenwald, Guardian - The National Security Agency routinely shares raw intelligence data with Israel without first sifting it to remove information about US citizens, a top-secret document provided to the Guardian by whistleblower Edward Snowden reveals.

Details of the intelligence-sharing agreement are laid out in a memorandum of understanding between the NSA and its Israeli counterpart that shows the US government handed over intercepted communications likely to contain phone calls and emails of American citizens. The agreement places no legally binding limits on the use of the data by the Israelis.

The disclosure that the NSA agreed to provide raw intelligence data to a foreign country contrasts with assurances from the Obama administration that there are rigorous safeguards to protect the privacy of US citizens caught in the dragnet. The intelligence community calls this process "minimization", but the memorandum makes clear that the information shared with the Israelis would be in its pre-minimized state.

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Trader Joe's dumps part-time workers' health insurance

Huffington Post - After extending health care coverage to many of its part-time employees for years, Trader Joe's has told workers who log fewer than 30 hours a week that they will need to find insurance on the Obamacare exchanges next year, according to a confidential memo from the grocer's chief executive.

In the memo to staff dated Aug. 30, Trader Joe's CEO Dan Bane said the company will cut part-timers a check for $500 in January and help guide them toward finding a new plan under the Affordable Care Act.

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Obamacare now has 10,000 pages of regulations

Economic Police Journal - Since March 2010, when President Barack Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act and its companion Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act, the administration has published in the Federal Register 109 final regulations governing how Obamacare will be implemented. These regulations add up to 10,516 pages in the Federal Register.

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How the budget changed for our last "unbelievably small" attack

Business Insider - The U.S. will shell out somewhere as much as $6 trillion dollars for the Iraq War, once all is said and done, according to a recent report out of Brown University.

According to Reuters, that figure includes $1.7 trillion spent so far with an additional $490 billion in benefits. Other expenses, including interest, could well mean that the expenses will balloon to as much as $6 trillion in total.

As Dave Weigal of Slate points out, that figure is well above the initial $60 billion dollar estimate that came from the Congressional Budget Office in the months leading up to the war.

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Amercian exceptionalism just got downgraded

Barack Obama - America is not the world’s policeman. Terrible things happen across the globe, and it is beyond our means to right every wrong, but when with modest effort and risk we can stop children from being gassed to death and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act.

That’s what makes America different. That’s what makes us exceptional. With humility, but with resolve, let us never lose sight of that essential truth.

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Great moments in science: Retraction of a retraction

improbable Research - Two years ago, the FASEB Journal retracted a paper that it had initially agreed to correct, after a dean at one of the author’s institutions said that a “well-recognized and top-class fact finding commission concluded that the publication contains gross flaws.” The retraction of the 2003 paper punctuated a complicated case involving several investigations as well as legal maneuvering.

Now, the journal has retracted the retraction. Here’s the beginning of the notice:

“Regarding the article titled, “Molecular analysis of Nogo expression in the hippocampus during development and following lesion and seizure,” by Susan Meier, Anja U. Bräuer, Bernd Heimrich, Martin E. Schwab, Robert Nitsch, and Nicolai E. Savaskan, published in the June 2003 issue of The FASEB Journal (FASEB J., 2003 Jun;17(9):1153—1155; doi:10.1096/fj.02-0453fje)….”

This could be the end of the story — or it could be just the beginning two chapters. There is a possibility — a possibility, mind you — that the retracted retraction will again be retracted.

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Syria misadventure blows Obama's cover

Sam Smith

It's likely that the Republicans – with their cuts in food stamps and other social welfare – will kill more children than Syria has with chemical warfare. .

But these days, this sort of comparison doesn’t matter because the people in the White House and the media have declared Syria our major crisis and the days of, say, Helen Thomas challenging such things are over.

How much of what Obama and aides are saying is pure lies is hard to tell at this point. Ten years back I did a piece for Harper’s written entirely in lies about the Iraq war. When I set out on this project I was amazed at how easy it was, including stuff like this:

The fundamental question was, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer was, absolutely. His regime had large, unaccounted-for stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons--including VX, sarin, cyclosarin, and mustard gas, anthrax, botulism, and possibly smallpox. Our conservative estimate was that Iraq then had a stockpile of between 100 and 500 tons of chemical-weapons agent. That was enough agent to fill 16,000 battlefield rockets. We had sources that told us that Saddam Hussein recently authorized Iraqi field commanders to use chemical weapons--the very weapons the dictator told the world he did not have. And according to the British government, the Iraqi regime could launch a biological or chemical attack in as little as forty-five minutes after the orders were given. There could be no doubt that Saddam Hussein had biological weapons and the capability to rapidly produce more, many more.

It will be sometime before we successfully dissect the verbal remains of the Obama Syrian misadventure, but one thing we know: he is being nowhere near as convincing as Bush and his efforts to overcome it with his misguidedly vaunted verbiage is not being particularly successful.

But then people who consider themselves intellectually superior don’t make particularly good liars. It’s not that they don’t lie; they just know how to do it well.

Part of this is the particular narcissism of the well educated, which often confuses recitation with communication and assumes that those being addressed will share the speakers’ admiration for themselves. The other is a failure to understand that effective fraud is an act of theater as much as one of argument. Which is why Pat Robertson is better at it than John Kerry.

But, says a reader, Barack Obama was so impressive as a presidential candidate.

Admittedly, he had a certain advantage amongst the liberals: he was black, a Harvard Law graduate and looked and acted the part.

But when you review the actual figures there was really nothing particularly astounding about his 2008 victory (unless you believed at the time that a black couldn’t possibly get elected).

In 2008, according to Gallup, 52% of Americans described themselves as Democrats and 42% as Republicans.

Barack Obama got 52.9% of the vote and Romney got 45.7%.

In other words, nothing much surprising happened.

But because of the way the media and the Democrats portrayed the vote, many Americans thought we were headed for a new age.

This not only was not true there was considerable evidence before and during the campaign that it wasn’t. For example, Obama:

- Wrote that conservatives and Bill Clinton were right to destroy social welfare,

- Supported making it harder to file class action suits in state courts

- Voted for a business-friendly "tort reform" bill

- Voted against a 30% interest rate cap on credit cards

- Had the most number of foreign lobbyist contributors in the primaries

- Was even more popular with Pentagon contractors than McCain

- Was most popular of the candidates with K Street lobbyists

- Supported the war on drugs

- Supported Real ID

- Supported the PATRIOT Act

- Supported the death penalty

- Campaigned in to support Joe Lieberman in the primary against liberal Ned Lamont

- Voted for a nuclear energy bill that full funding for Yucca Mountain.

- Came in at 48th in the ranking of senators by the League of Conservation Voters

- Promised to double funding for private charter schools, part of a national effort to undermine public education.

- Supporrted the No Child Left Behind Act

- Expressed a willingness to bomb Iran, expand the Afghn war and invade Pakistan

- Supported Israeli aggression and apartheid.

- Favored turning over Jerusalem to Israel

- Opposed gay marriage

- Opposed single payer healthcare

- Said "everything is on the table" with Social Security early in campaign. In May 2008 he indicated opposition to privatizing Social Security, raising the minimum age, or reduce cost of living increases.

Yet the media and Obama’s backers maintained the fiction that because he was a bright good looking liberal black guy everything would be all right.
The truth has been coming home to roost ever since and Syria has perhaps finally blown the cover.

It’s too early to know for sure, but perhaps it’s at least time to stop pretending Obama was someone he never was.

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German paper says Assad rejected use of chemical weapons

Syrian President Bashar Assad has repeatedly rejected requests from his field commanders for approval to use chemical weapons, according to a report this weekend in a German newspaper. The report in Bild am Sonntag, which is a widely read and influential national Sunday newspaper, reported that the head of the German Foreign Intelligence agency, Gerhard Schindler, last week told a select group of German lawmakers that intercepted communications had convinced German intelligence officials that Assad did not order or approve what is believed to be a sarin gas attack on Aug. 21 that killed hundreds of people in Damascus's eastern suburbs.

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How Putin saved Obama, Congress & the EU from further embarassment

Juan Cole - Secretary of State John Kerry was asked at a press conference in London Monday morning if there was anything that could forestall a US missile attack on Damascus, and he replied off the cuff that Syria could surrender its chemical weapons stockpile to the international community within a week.

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov pounced on Kerry’s comment, abruptly announcing that Russia would see what it could do. Lavrov said, “If the establishment of international control over chemical weapons in that country would allow avoiding strikes, we will immediately start working with Damascus . . . We are calling on the Syrian leadership to not only agree on placing chemical weapons storage sites under international control, but also on its subsequent destruction and fully joining the treaty on prohibition of chemical weapons,”

Syria’s portly Foreign Minister Walid Muallim clearly knows how to chow down while the meal is still hot, and he wasted no time embracing Lavrov’s suggestion. Muallim said, “The Syrian leadership welcomes the Russian initiative because of its own eagerness to preserve the lives of Syrian citizens and ensure the security of the country, and given our confidence in the desire of the Russian leadership to prevent an attack on our country.”

Senate majority leader Harry Reid immediately postponed a vote on a Syria attack by his body that had been scheduled for Wednesday.

The indications were that President Obama might well not get 60 votes in the Senate for his attack on Damascus, and Reid must have exhaled a big sigh of relief. As for the House of Representatives, the likelihood of it voting to allow Obama to fire cruise missiles at Syrian targets is between slim and none.

To that extent, Putin’s suggestion (and it was his; Lavrov doesn’t have an independent power base and does as the president tells him) functions to save Obama a lot of trouble.

He can now possibly avoid the most embarrassing defeat in congress of a president on a major international issue since that body told Woodrow Wilson where he could stick his League of Nations.

Likewise, Putin’s proposal ironically helped soothe troubled waters in the European Union. German Chancellor Angela Merkel was by all accounts absolutely furious at Spain, Britain and France for issuing a statement at the G20 meeting in Moscow supportive of President Obama’s condemnation of Syria for chemcial weapons use (though they did not back a military attack on Syria). Merkel reprimanded Spain in particular for not waiting for a joint European Union statement. (For Spain to defy Germany at this point in time is rather like a deeply indebted gambler being rude to the casino owner). Spain for its part only talked a good game, going on to say that Spanish law forbade the Spanish military from in any way being involved with the US assault on Damascus, since it is not in self-defense.. It is not clear what Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy was supporting at the G20, if he thinks military action so illegal that Spain has to avoid having anything to do with it. And, of course, the British Parliament had rebuked Prime Minister David Cameron for considering joining the US in air strikes on Syria.

Putin’s gambit is irresistible to the West, even if it amounts to nothing. After all, it will take time to amount to nothing, and with the passage of time the urgency of military action (already low) will dissipate irrevocably.

The Russian initiative is not attractive because it seems practical or likely to be swiftly implemented but because it allows everyone involved to save face. Obama can look statesmanlike. He is already taking credit for Putin’s move, saying it would not have come about without his own saber-rattling.

The US Congress might be able to avoid the uncomfortable position of agreeing that Syria is guilty of chemical weapons use but declining to do anything about it.

And, the European Union was desperately looking for some step that could avoid further friction within the deeply divided organization.

All this is good news for Western politicians and bad news for the Syrian rebels, who are denouncing the Russian initiative as mendacious. They had hoped that the US would degrade some key regime capabilities, especially the bombing of airports that the regime uses to resupply its troops. Of course, even before the Putin Plan, it was increasingly unlikely that Obama would gain authorization for such a step, in any case.

The one good thing about this development is that it strengthens Russia’s position with the Baath government of Bashar al-Assad and may lend new energy to Moscow’s determination to broker a compromise between the rebels and the regime.

Without a US or Western bombing campaign, the Syrian regime is likely just strong enough to hold on for years. The rebels’ advance of last spring has stalled and in some places been reversed. Some sort of negotiation now seems likely. While in my view the two sides are not yet desperate or exhausted enough to make that sort of agreement the Lebanese acquiesced in at Taif in 1989, they may be able to take small steps toward that eventual outcome, which increasingly seems the most plausible one.

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Owners faking pets as service dogs

CBS, Chicago- Despicable. That’s the word used by advocates for the disabled to describe the newest trend – people disguising their dogs as service dogs to travel, shop, and even go to night clubs...

The evidence appears blatantly on YouTube.

“I took Bubs out for a walk and it started raining and I don’t feel like walking him home so we’re going to get on the bus and I’m going to make him a disabled dog,” said an unidentified man in a video in which he brags about putting a muzzle and fake vest on his dog to ride public transit and later get special treatment at a restaurant. “This service dog scam works pretty good. Take a bow Bubs. Good service dog!”

In recent New York Post story, several candid dog owners bragged of their own fakery. After purchasing vests, patches and certificates online, they talked about taking their dogs grocery shopping, nightclubbing and to the theater.

“He’s been to most movie theaters in the city and more nightclubs than most of my friends,” a 33-year old New Yorker told the newspaper about his Yorkie.

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EU plans to put speed limiters on cars

Telegraph - All cars could be fitted with devices that stop them going over 70mph, under new EU road safety measures which aim to cut deaths from road accidents by a third.

Under the proposals new cars would be fitted with cameras that could read road speed limit signs and automatically apply the brakes when this is exceeded.

Patrick McLoughlin, the Transport Secretary, is said to be opposed to the plans, which could also mean existing cars are sent to garages to be fitted with the speed limiters, preventing them from going over 70mph.

The new measures have been announced by the European Commission’s Mobility and Transport Department as a measure to reduce the 30,000 people who die on the roads in Europe every year.

A Government source told the Mail on Sunday Mr McLoughlin had instructed officials to block the move because they ‘violated’ motorists’ freedom. They said: “This has Big Brother written all over it and is exactly the sort of thing that gets people's backs up about Brussels.

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The real Hillary Clinton: It takes more than a village to get credit from her

Wikipedia - The majority of [It Takes a Village] was reportedly written by ghostwriter Barbara Feinman. When the book was first announced in April 1995, The New York Times reported publisher Simon & Schuster as saying "The book will actually be written by Barbara Feinman, a journalism professor at Georgetown University in Washington. Ms. Feinman will conduct a series of interviews with Mrs. Clinton, who will help edit the resulting text."

Feinman spent seven months on the project and was paid $120,000 for her work. Feinman, however, was not mentioned anywhere in the book. Clinton's acknowledgment section began: "It takes a village to bring a book into the world, as everyone who has written one knows. Many people have helped me to complete this one, sometimes without even knowing it. They are so numerous that I will not even attempt to acknowledge them individually, for fear that I might leave one out."

During her promotional tour for the book, Clinton said, "I actually wrote the book ... I had to write my own book because I want to stand by every word." Clinton stated that Feinman assisted in interviews and did some editorial drafting of "connecting paragraphs", while Clinton herself wrote the final manuscript in longhand.

This led Feinman to complain at the time to Capitol Style magazine over the lack of acknowledgement. In 2001, The Wall Street Journal reported that "New York literary circles are buzzing with vitriol over Sen. Clinton's refusal, so far, to share credit with any writer who helps on her book." Later, in a 2002 article for The Writer's Chronicle, Barbara Feinman Todd (now using her married name) related that the project with Clinton had gone smoothly, producing drafts in a round-robin style. Feinman agrees that Clinton was involved with the project, but also states that, "Like any first lady, Mrs. Clinton had an extremely hectic schedule and writing a book without assistance would have been logistically impossible." Feinman reiterates that her only objection to the whole process was the lack of any acknowledgement

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Transportation, class & ethnicity

The Review has been a lonely voice pointing out the deep class bias involved in emphasizing high speed rail over other forms of rail transportation. We learned about class and transit in our years covering mass transit in Washington. We just stumbled upon a breakdown of ridership on the Metro subway vs. DC bus ridership in 2006. These figures illustrate why we called one new subway line The Great White Way.

- Percent of Metrobus riders earning less than $50,000: 44%
- Percent of Metrorail riders earning less than $50,000: 16%

- Percent of Metrobus riders earning $100,000 or more: 12%
- Percent of Metrorail riders earning $100,000 or more: 35%

- Percent of Metrobus riders who are black: 48%
- Percent of Metrobus riders who are white: 34%

- Percent of Metrorail riders who are black: 18%
- Percent of Metrorail riders who are white: 67%

[Washington Post]

Over the past decade the far more expensive sbuway system has only increased ridership by 14% while the bus system has gone down by 12% , a portion of it having shifted to the subway as bus service was cut or redirected to increase subway ridership.

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More questions about whose chemical weapons they are

Firedog Lake - Part of the Obama Administration’s case against the Assad government rests on information you can’t know. This information, only available in classified briefings to members of Congress, supposedly proves the case that Bashar al-Assad ordered a chemical weapons attack and thereby violated international “norms” that only the US is willing to unilaterally enforce.

But apparently some members of Congress, even after seeing the best evidence the Obama Administration can muster, are not convinced Assad ordered the attack.

Ezra Klein: So you’re saying that you don’t question the idea that a chemical weapons attack happened, just the idea that Assad himself gave the order.

Congressman Alan Grayson: The administration has said there’s no direct evidence, only circumstantial evidence. I know what that circumstantial evidence is, and I’m not impressed. The whole discourse is, ‘how do we change his incentives?’ But they may not be relevant here. If there were direct evidence that Assad ordered it, it would be quite meaningful to say Assad ordered it and how do we change his incentives in the future. But if we assume he’s a rational, calculating person, why would he have ordered the attack in the first place?

Congressman Rush Holt has also expressed skepticism on the intelligence saying he thought it was “moderately convincing.” Adding “Nobody’s using the phrase ‘slam dunk’. And they’d better not, because it’s not that good. ”
And now reports have surfaced that German Intelligence believes that Assad did not personally order the attacks.

President Bashar al-Assad did not personally order last month’s chemical weapons attack near Damascus that has triggered calls for US military intervention, and blocked numerous requests from his military commanders to use chemical weapons against regime opponents in recent months, a German newspaper has reported , citing unidentified, high-level national security sources.

The intelligence findings were based on phone calls intercepted by a German surveillance ship operated by the BND, the German intelligence service, and deployed off the Syrian coast, Bild am Sonntag said. The intercepted communications suggested Assad, who is accused of war crimes by the west, including foreign secretary William Hague, was not himself involved in last month’s attack or in other instances when government forces have allegedly used chemical weapons.

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Last May UN reported Syrian rebels used sarin

Reuters - U.N. human rights investigators have gathered testimony from casualties of Syria's civil war and medical staff indicating that rebel forces have used the nerve agent sarin, one of the lead investigators said on Sunday.

The United Nations independent commission of inquiry on Syria has not yet seen evidence of government forces having used chemical weapons, which are banned under international law, said commission member Carla Del Ponte.

"Our investigators have been in neighboring countries interviewing victims, doctors and field hospitals and, according to their report of last week which I have seen, there are strong, concrete suspicions but not yet incontrovertible proof of the use of sarin gas, from the way the victims were treated," Del Ponte said in an interview with Swiss-Italian television.

"This was use on the part of the opposition, the rebels, not by the government authorities," she added, speaking in Italian.

Del Ponte, a former Swiss attorney-general who also served as prosecutor of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, gave no details as to when or where sarin may have been used.

The Geneva-based inquiry into war crimes and other human rights violations is separate from an investigation of the alleged use of chemical weapons in Syria instigated by U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, which has since stalled.

President Bashar al-Assad's government and the rebels accuse each another of carrying out three chemical weapon attacks, one near Aleppo and another near Damascus, both in March, and another in Homs in December.

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Furthermore. . .

IMGUR

RFK Jr diary revealed More

Forgotten interview with John Lennon found

Quotes

Syria is Obama's "weapon of mass distraction" - Bill Cunningham

A criminal is a person with predatory instincts without sufficient capital to form a corporation -- Howard Scott.

Pocket paradigms

The trouble with MSNBC, Fox & CNN is that they can't tell the difference between breaking news and broken news - Sam Smith

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20,000 gallons of water stolen from elementary school in drought stricken area

Think Progress  Someone stole 20,000 gallons of water from an elementary school in Bridgeville, CA over Labor Day weekend — the second water theft in the rural area over the last several weeks. According to the Humboldt County sheriff’s office, the culprit used a school garden hose to drain the water tank and carried it off in a truck. The school had to close for a day as the tank was refilled.

Another water tank in the area was drained of 20,000 gallons in July, leaving 330 people briefly without water. That tank provides water to another elementary school, a fire station, the post office, and a state park campground.

Humboldt County, a remote northern California region dominated by cattle ranches and marijuana farms, has been hit especially hard by the drought afflicting California and other Western states.

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Huge jump in unemployment for Florida families

Sun Sentinel - Florida families with children under 18 have suffered a 93 percent jump in unemployment with at least one parent laid off from 2005 to 2011, according to a new Census Bureau report.

The increase was nearly triple the 33 percent national rate, the bureau reported in its America's Families and Living Arrangements: 2012.

Even after the Great Recession officially ended in 2009, Florida families have struggled with unemployment, the report found.

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One never knows, do one?

Sam Smith - As things stood a short while ago, a black liberal Democratic president and a Massachusetts liberal secretary of state were about to get our country involved in a major unnecessary military conflict.

Who may have have saved us? Russian premier Putin and the United Nations,  two of the most disliked creatures on the American political and media scene. Add to them the positive efforts of an anti-abortion, anti-gay Pope and, as Fats Waller liked to put it, one never knows, do one?

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Syria: Follow the bouncing bombs

Philly.Com - Obama's top aide says the administration lacks "irrefutable, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt evidence" that skeptical Americans, including lawmakers who will start voting on military action this week, are seeking.

Global Research - Obama is going on a whirlwind media blitz this week in an attempt to sell a very skeptical public on war with Syria.
Yet the Washington Post notes:

Obama’s top aide says the administration lacks “irrefutable, beyond-a-reasonable-doubt evidence” that skeptical Americans, including lawmakers who will start voting on military action this week, are seeking.

Indeed, those who have seen the evidence say that it is incredibly weak.  German intelligence also says that Assad didn’t order the attacks.
Moreover, President Obama correctly noted in 2007:

The President does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.

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Butt wipes clogging sewer systems

Gawker - According to a report in The Washington Post, wipes are responsible for a 35 percent jump in jammed pumps and clogged pipes in the Washington area over the last few years.

Adult wipers have also cost the Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission more than $1 million dollars because they’ve had to “install heavy-duty grinders to shred wipes and other debris before they reach pumps on the way to the treatment plant.” On top of this, officials in the District’s water and sewer agency have spent over 500 hundred man-hours in the last year “removing stuck wipes.” And this summer, after hearing complaints that toilets wouldn’t flush in London, a 15-ton “glob of wipes and hardened cooking grease the size of a bus” was discovered in a sewer pipe.

With “flushable” wipes making up 14 percent of the $4 billion “pre-moistened” wipe market, and with sales predicted to grow annually by 6 percent for the next five years, the Federal Trade Commission is now leading an investigation into the “flushable” label.

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Pentagon planning larger war against Syria

McClatchy - The Pentagon is preparing for a longer bombardment of Syria than it originally had planned, with a heavy barrage of missile strikes followed soon after by more attacks against targets that the opening salvos missed or failed to destroy, officials said.

The planning for intense attacks over a three-day period reflects the growing belief in the White House and the Pentagon that the U.S. needs more firepower to inflict even minimal damage on Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces, which have been widely dispersed over the last two weeks, the officials said.

Two U.S. officers said the White House asked for an expanded target list in recent days to include many more than the 50 or so targets on the initial list. As a result, Pentagon planners are weighing whether to use Air Force bombers, in addition to five warships now on patrol in the eastern Mediterranean Sea, to launch cruise missiles and air-to-surface missiles from hundreds of miles offshore, well out of range of Syrian air defenses.

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Notes from the cove: Living in bipolar America

Sam Smith

Some days, when I finish editing and writing stuff about our nation and its politics, I get in my car and drive “up street” – the five miles on a two lane country road to the center of our Maine town. I am on my way to run  errands or to meet someone, but also because the trip between the virtual nation I’ve just been describing and the real place toward which I’m headed is like crossing the Atlantic.

It’s not a matter of culture shock. More a matter of culture recovery. Rediscovering what it really means to be human and an American and to be around people who actually practice those things the people I quote on the computer too often only pretend to do.

I was born in Washington and lived there most of my life. But about thirty years ago I began realizing that it wasn’t my town any more. In 1981 I wrote an article about it for the Washington Post:

Could you stop the renaissance of Washington a minute? I want to get off. I have to run down to People's and restock my inventory of Rolaids before reading one more article about how the city is being reborn, revived, and revitalized. This city - the Paris of prevarication, the London of dissemblance, the Florence of deceit - has outdone itself: It is telling itself and the world that it is getting better.

The much touted physical changes of the city have produced little other than rampant displacement, creeping homogeneity and an overabundance of automatic teller machines. Washington's "greater sophistication" is virtually indistinguishable from rampant cynicism and mindless profligacy, and its autoerotic fascination with power for its own sake threatens to prove that masturbation does cause insanity.

The real story of the new Washington is that the told story is a lie. Strip away the icons of progress and you will find a new Washington that is not vibrant; it merely vibrates. A Washington that is not more sophisticated but comprehends and considers less. A Washington whose interest in culture is marked more by acquisition than by appreciation. And a Washington whose power is, in truth, declining because it has lost the key component of respect. . . .

The new city is one of real estate dealers rather than merchants, the city where you damn well better not leave home without it. It is the clone of Gotham, sire of scandal so tawdry that it has discredited political corruption, the city in which a day’s work can consist of a memorandum revised, a two-hour quiche lorraine and martini lunch and four phone calls to say you’re all tied up.

Yet I hung in there until four years ago before moving to Maine, a place I had learned to love over many a summer vacation. I considered it both an act of exile and of liberation.

But it has also left me a bit bipolar, trying to describe a false world while living in a true one. That’s why I enjoy watching my screen go blank and driving to town.

Admittedly we have a remarkably dumb governor, but I have been delighted over the past four years by how few scoundrels, hustlers and incompetents I have run into. These are not highly valued attributes in Maine and folks tend to spot them early around here.

The Washington crowd is more like Willie Loman: "He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine. He' s a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine."

Or, more politely, as James Kirchick of the New Republic wrote of our then new president:

Obama is, in his own words, something of a Rorschach test. In his latest book, “The Audacity of Hope,” he writes, “I am new enough on the national political scene that I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

And we’re still doing it.

The other day I began wondering how the national icons paraded before us by an obsequious mass media would get along here. John Boehner would clearly be the town undertaker. Michelle Bachmann, I guessed, would run the tourist trap gift shop. Bill Clinton would be the salesman you’d avoid when you went to the Suburu dealer to buy a new Outback. Hillary Clinton would be the realtor concentrating on newcomers since the locals had learned to go elsewhere. John Kerry would be the self-absorbed preacher to whom Jesus was only the penultimate savior. And Barack Obama might be the manager of the local Hampton Inn who lived 30 miles way and had little to do with the town’s residents except when they parked in his lot. Or maybe the lawyer you’d use for a real estate settlement but look elsewhere in case of a pending divorce.  

There were a few people who might actually fit in. I could see Joe Biden sitting every night at the bar at Gritty McDuff’s, trading sea stories with whoever was next to him. Bernie Sanders would make a good chair of the town council and Elizabeth Warren would be a great principal of the high school.

But on the whole, the most prominent people running the nation would not be particularly useful around our town. That’s because things like integrity, cooperation, competence and reality still matter.

Which is why the economy, our school system, the condition of the roads and what’s happening because of climate change – including the eastward drift of lobsters and crabs – are a hell of a lot more important that what someone says we should be doing in Syria.

But that’s not true in Washington where the powerful get to invent crises so they don’t have to solve real problems.

And they have the arguments, the numbers and studies to back them. But in the end these are designed not to find reality but to market a political Disney World.

You can’t get away with that in our town. Perhaps one reason is that they used to build ships here, and as Joseph Conrad once noted, “Of all the living creatures upon land and sea, it is ships alone that cannot be taken in by barren pretenses, that will not put up with bad art from their masters.” The capital could never go to sea.

The other morning I listened as MSNBC’s Chris Hayes spewed numbers as though he was trying to ace yet another standardized test that passes in his mind for real life.  His hands were waving, his voice was excited and yet his message was hard to discern or remember.

Listening to him, I thought of the saying someone had passed on to me a few days earlier: “Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not using one in a fruit salad.”

Washington is full of knowledge without any place to go. My town is full of wisdom and all I have to do is drive up street to find a bit of it.

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Rebuilding America: Cooperatives

Starting a co-op in your community

USW's cooperative program starting with laundries The rise of cooperative economics Sandy victims look to cooperatives

Co-ops work and have for decades

New co-op model for Main Street jobs

Cooperative power

Nearly one billion people belong to (and own) cooperatives

Why cooperatives matter

How Spanish cooperative kept unemployment 40% below national rate

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Tales from the attic: The Hill in the 1950s

 Sam Smith

Everything was simpler in the 1950s. Even the US Capitol which I wandered around with my mike and tape recorder like it was my apartment building. Even the US Capitol Police force was comprised mainly of young men benefiting from the patronage granted their fathers by various members of Congress. It was a fairly pleasant crowd and you knew you were not just dealing with a law enforcement officer but perhaps a grad student whose dad was a buddy of the majority leader.

My favorite Hill cop story from the period involves a friend who was a bagpipe -playing Lebanese Catholic from Boston who knew everyone in the Demcratic Party and worked for a number of them including Massachusetts governor Foster Furcolo and, later, Ted Kennedy. She was on her way to an LBJ State of the Union from Boston but was late and arrived from the plane still carrying her bagpipe case in which rested not only the instrument but some pita bread her sister had made.

In a hall crowded with some of America's most powerful, my friend was told by a Capitol police officer to open the bagpipe case. The officer was disturbed by what he found inside. "Don't worry," said my friend. "It's just a bagpipe and some pita bread. . . Call your chief and tell him Terri Haddad is here with her bagpipes. He knows me."

The officer did and at the other end the Capitol Hill police chief issued one blunt order: "Tell her to play 'Danny Boy."

And so for the chief and many of America's most powerful, she did and then was allowed to repack her instrument and go hear the speech.

If you were from Michigan or California and you went and worked up on the Hill, you had a southern accent within six months. It was very, very Southern; they were the people who controlled it. People like Sam Rayburn.

There was a Congressman from Ohio who had gotten on Speaker Rayburn's bad side, and he had lost his favorite committee assignment and been sort of sent to purgatory. After Sam Rayburn died and John McCormack was the new Speaker of the House, he goes in to see McCormack and he says, "I just want you know Mr. Speaker, that I've learned my lesson." He said, "I'll never do that again. You can always count on me to go along with whatever you want." John McCormack reached into the desk and pulled out a piece of paper and says, "I'm sorry, but Sam left me a list."

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Word: Congratulating the president for obeying the Constitution for a change

Glenn Greenwald - It's a potent sign of how low the American political bar is set that gratitude is expressed because a US president says he will ask Congress to vote before he starts bombing another country that is not attacking or threatening the US. That the US will not become involved in foreign wars of choice without the consent of the American people through their representatives Congress is a central mandate of the US Constitution.

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Great moments in job interviews

Time - When Alan Bacon learned he had a job interview with a franchise of Currys, he didn’t think publicly jamming to Daft Punk would be a required skill. He was wrong.

The UK electronics retailers is apologizing after one of its stores apparently broke job applicants up into teams and had them to engage in a dance off as part of a team building exercise. ”I think everyone initially thought it was a joke,” Bacon, who was not ultimately offered a job, told the BBC, “but they were serious.”

And while the activity might have been meant to build group unity, it appears the task was more successful at humiliating applicants who had spent the week preparing themselves for a serious interview. ”I just felt so embarrassed and uncomfortable” said Bacon. ”I ended up dancing to ‘Around the World’ by Daft Punk, doing rubbish robotics in my suit in front of a group of strangers. I told my dad it was like a scene out of The Office. I would have walked out but I need a job.”

A spokesman for Currys has said the impromptu dance performance is not part of their official recruitment guidelines, and they are inviting all applicants for another interview — this time likely without the musical component. The company also told the BBC that it was investigating those orchestrated the recruitment session. Bacon, for his part, had seen enough. He declined a second interview

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IBM to end 110,000 retirees' medical coverage

Wall Street Journal - International Business Machines Corp. plans to move about 110,000 retirees off its company-sponsored health plan and instead give them a payment to buy coverage on a health-insurance exchange, in a sign that even big, well-capitalized employers aren't likely to keep providing the once-common benefits as medical costs continue to rise.

IBM's shift is an indication that health-insurance marketplaces, similar to the public exchanges proposed under President Barack Obama's health-care overhaul, will play a bigger role as companies move coverage down the path taken by many pensions, paying employees and retirees a fixed sum to manage their own care.

In notices signed by Chief Health Director Kyu Rhee, IBM has told retirees in recent weeks that to keep receiving coverage, they will need to pick a plan offered through Extend Health, a large private Medicare exchange run by New York-based Towers Watson & Co.

Medicare is the federally administered system of health insurance for people age 65 and over, and the disabled. Some people buy Medicare Advantage plans, administered by private insurers, and others buy policies to cover gaps in Medicare coverage.

IBM told retirees that its current retiree coverage will end for Medicare-eligible retirees after Dec. 31, 2013, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by IBM.

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The economy Washington and the media refuse to face

Robert Reich - The share of the population working or seeking a job is nearly its lowest in thirty years. The unemployment rate among high-school dropouts is 11 percent; for blacks, 12.6 percent.

And the median wage keeps dropping, adjusted for inflation.Incomes for all but the top 1 percent are below where they were at the start of the economic recovery in 2009.

A decent society would put people to work — even if this required more government spending on roads, bridges, ports, pipelines, parks and schools.

A decent society would lift the minimum wage, expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (a wage subsidy), and provide food stamps and housing assistance so that no family with a full-time worker has to live in poverty.

We can afford this minimal level of decency.

Deficit hawks in both parties don’t want you to know this but the federal deficit as a proportion of the total economy is shrinking fast: It’s on track to be only 4 percent by the end of September, when the fiscal year ends. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office predicts it will be only 3.4 percent in the fiscal year starting October 1.

To put this into perspective, consider that the average ratio of the deficit to the GDP over the past 30 years has been 3.3 percent. So the deficit is barely a problem at all. (We’re still projected to have large deficits starting 10 years from now because of all the aging boomers needing health care.) Yet while attention is focused on Syria, food stamps for the nation’s poor are being cut.

Even if the Democrats prevent these draconian cuts, food stamp benefits will still be reduced in November, when a provision in the 2009 stimulus bill expires.

While attention is focused on Syria, funds for the nation’s poorest schools are being slashed. Teachers are still being let go. Classrooms are more crowded than ever. The sequester will drain even more funds after October 1.

While attention is focused on Syrian, low-income housing is disappearing.

Funding for housing vouchers has already been cut by $854 million this year, with the result that half of all public housing authorities have stopped issuing new vouchers — even though the percentage of households most in need of assistance has grown by 19 percent since 2009. The cuts scheduled to begin October 1 will be even more severe.

While attention is focused on Syria, America’s rich are growing even richer. A single year’s income of one of the ten richest Americans could buy housing for every homeless person in America for an entire year. (This calculation is based on a typical day last winter, when over 633,000 people were homeless, and the typical monthly rental cost of a unit with single room occupancy of $558 per month.)

But we are not talking about any of this. We are not debating what’s happening to our nation. We are not creating jobs for the long-term unemployed. We are not raising the minimum wage, expanding the EITC, or providing enough food stamps to keep working Americans out of poverty. We are not improving the nation’s poorest schools or providing enough low-income housing to keep destitute families off the nation’s streets.

We are not reforming our tax code or fixing our schools or reforming our brutal immigration system. We are not addressing the widening gap between a few at the top who are doing better than ever and a larger number below who are sinking. We are not getting big money out of politics.

We are paralyzed at home — as we turn our attention to a potential quagmire abroad. This is the great tragedy of our time.

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Another step for American cooperatives

National Cooperative Bank - The world's largest industrial, worker-owned and run cooperative, Mondragon, has agreed through its cooperative bank, Laboral Kutxa, to partner and build cooperative businesses ithroughout America with the U.S. based National Cooperative Bank.

NCB's customers are cooperatives such as grocery wholesaler co-ops, food co-ops, purchasing co-ops, credit unions and housing co-ops. Headquartered in Washington, DC, NCB has offices in Alaska, California, New York, Ohio and Virginia.

Laboral Kutxa a cooperative bank fielding 450 branches with over 1,300,000 customers. Mondragon is the world's largest worker-owned industrial cooperative but also the top Basque region industrial group, ranked tenth in Spain with 80,000 personnel, a presence in 70 countries, and expanding operations across the U.S. and North America.

This agreement represents Mondragon's second precedent-setting U.S. collaboration during the past four years. The United Steelworkers, and Mondragon International agreed to develop a hybrid union co-op model that is currently used by multiple U.S. unions and underway in over ten U.S. cities with projects ranging from an organic sustainable farm to a commercial laundry to energy efficiency.

In the U.S. alone, member-owned organizations account for $3 trillion in assets, $500 billion in revenue, and more than one million jobs. The United States fields 29,000 cooperatives holding 350 million co-op memberships and consisting of 900 rural electric coops with 42 million clients in 47 states, two million farmer-members in 3000 farmer-owned cooperatives who provide over 250 thousand jobs and annual wages of $8 billion, 250 purchasing coops offering group buying and sharing to more than 50,000 independent businesses, 7500 credit unions providing financial services to nearly 90 million members, and circa 8000 housing coops providing one million homes. Mondragon's recent annual sales in North America have reached the $250 million level.

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Kerry lies about his Iraq war position

Institute for Public Accuracy - Communications director for the Institute for Public Accuracy, Sam Husseini said : “Last night, John Kerry told Chris Hayes on MSNBC that he and Pentagon chief Chuck Hagel ‘opposed the president’s decision to go into Iraq...’ This is a total lie — and it covers up the fact that the administration is full of people, including Kerry and Hagel, who themselves falsely claimed Iraq had WMDs and backed the invasion of that country.

“In 2002, John Kerry voted for the Iraq war authorization, saying: ‘Why is Saddam Hussein attempting to develop nuclear weapons when most nations don’t even try? … According to intelligence, Iraq has chemical and biological weapons … Iraq is developing unmanned aerial vehicles capable of delivering chemical and biological warfare agents.’

“When I questioned Kerry in 2011 about voting to authorize the Iraq war, he said: ‘I didn’t vote for the Iraq war. I voted to give the president authority that he misused and abused. And from the moment he used it, I opposed that.’ [see video at 2:30] However, a look at the record shows that after the Iraq invasion, Kerry did the opposite, outflanking Bush’s war stance in 2003: ‘I fear that in the run-up to the 2004 election the administration is considering what is tantamount to a cut-and-run strategy.’” See CNN “Kerry stands by ‘yes’ vote on Iraq war.”

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Obamadmin vastly increased NSA's criminality in 2011

Washington Post - The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

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Urban apartheid: DC man has everything taken by city for owing $134 in property taxes

Washington Post - On the day Bennie Coleman lost his house, the day armed U.S. marshals came to his door and ordered him off the property, he slumped in a folding chair across the street and watched the vestiges of his 76 years hauled to the curb.

Movers carted out his easy chair, his clothes, his television. Next came the things that were closest to his heart: his Marine Corps medals and photographs of his dead wife, Martha. The duplex in Northeast Washington that Coleman bought with cash two decades earlier was emptied and shuttered. By sundown, he had nowhere to go.

All because he didn’t pay a $134 property tax bill.

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Great moments at Buckingham Palace

Daily Mail, UK - A suspected burglar arrested after being discovered in a royal state room at Buckingham Palace is being held in a mental health unit, it has emerged. DJ Victor Miller, 37, was found 'in an area currently open to the public during the day' after scaling a 12ft fence to get into the palace.

Prince Andrew furious at cop

Daily Mail, UK - Armed police challenged Prince Andrew in the gardens at Buckingham Palace and ordered him to 'verify his identity' after mistaking him for an intruder. The Duke of York, 53, had gone for a walk in the gardens to enjoy the early evening sunshine when he was stopped by two police officers.
A Royal insider alleged the officers pointed their guns at the Prince and told him to 'put your hands up and get on the ground' before realizing who he was.

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Republicans may kill more people than Syrian chemical weapons

Progressive Review - The BBC quotes John Kerry as accusing Syria of using chemical weapons to kill 1,429 people, including 426 children, citing a US intelligence assessment.

Now consider this from the Center for American Progress:

House-proposed cuts to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program would cut at least 4 million to 6 million people off nutrition assistance, including removing 200,000 low-income children from school meals. These cuts are on top of nutrition cuts already slated for this November, which will hit 22 million children.

 If less than one tenth of one percent of children die as a result of illness because of lack of school meals, that would be more than have been killed by chemicals in Syria according to John Kerry.

If less than one hundredth of a percent of people removed from food stamps die as a result, the toll will be roughly three times greater than allege in Syrian chemical attacks.

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AIPAC to send 250 lobbyists to Congress to press for war against Syria

Reuters - The influential pro-Israel American Israel Public Affairs Committee will deploy hundreds of activists next week to win support in Congress for military action in Syria, amid an intense White House effort to convince wavering U.S. lawmakers to vote for limited strikes.

"We plan a major lobbying effort with about 250 activists in Washington to meet with their senators and representatives," an AIPAC source said on Saturday.

Congressional aides said they expected the meetings and calls on Tuesday, as President Barack Obama and officials from his administration make their case for missile strikes over the apparent use of chemical weapons by Syrian President Bashar Assad's government.

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Another reporter may go to prison for doing her job

 

Media Matters - Fox News' Jana Winter was granted a delay yesterday in a court hearing that will determine whether she will go to jail for doing her job as a reporter, a story  that has been largely ignored in the media.

In July 2012, while reporting on the Aurora, Colorado, movie theater shooting, Winter broke the story that alleged shooter James Holmes "mailed a notebook 'full of details about how he was going to kill people' to a University of Colorado psychiatrist before the attack, and the parcel may have sat unopened in a mailroom for up to a week before its discovery [in July of 2012]." Her reporting was based on statements from "a law enforcement source."

Because this leak violated a judge's gag order issued in the case, Holmes' defense team is now demanding she reveal her sources. Judge Carlos Samour noted in yesterday's opinion that there exists "the real possibility that Winter may face indefinite jail time in this case as a remedial sanction for her refusal to disclose her confidential sources."

National Press Club President Angela Greiling Keane noted:

Attempting to get that information by subpoenaing reporters in order to learn their anonymous sources goes too far. It jeopardizes a value of greater significance. If anonymous sources believe their identities can be dredged up in court, they will be less likely to disclose to the press information of vital public importance. That's not a risk worth increasing.

If Jana Winter goes to prison, this would be a case of criminalizing journalism. Every journalist who picks up a note pad and files a crime report bears the same risk.

Sadly, a Nexis search for "Jana Winter" reveals only a handful of TV segments on CNN and Fox News and less than 100 newspaper stories. With this level of threat to First Amendment rights, Jana Winter should be a household name.

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Furthermore. . .

ROBERT MCLOUD

NY TIMES
Worst idea of the day

Joe Biden: "I think Janet [Napolitano] should be on the Supreme Court of the United States.”

Meanwhile. . .

@tomsherwood I don't have time to read this: @WashBizOnline: How to regain control of your life at every level

Maine value clash

The state of Maine has fined the operator of four medical marijuana dispensaries $18,000 for using pesticides in violation of state law and program rules.

Quotes

It has long been recognized, however, that the special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only the economy but also the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process . . .The state need not permit it own creation to consume it. -- Justices White, Brennan and Marshall in First National Bank of Boston vs. Belotti, 1978

Pocket paradigms

Today's diuretic discourse over journalistic values largely reflects an attempt to justify the unjustifiable, namely the rapid decline of independent sources of information and the monopolization of the vaunted "market place of ideas." In the end, the hated Internet is a far better heir of Peter Zenger, Thomas Paine, Frederick Douglass, and Mark Twain than is the the typical American daily or TV channel.-Sam Smith

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Russia sends four more warships near Syria

Russia sends four more warships to eastern Mediterranean near Syria The SSV-201 Priazovye reconnaissance ship, escorted by two landing ships, Minsk and Novocherkassk, had already passed through Turkey's Bosphorus Strait, Russia's Interfax news agency quoted a source from the Saint Petersburg-based central naval command as saying on Friday. A third landing ship was just making a short stop to lift "special cargo" in Novorossiysk in the Black Sea, the report added without elaborating on the cargo.

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Obama considering training Syrian rebel troops

Telegraph, UK -The Obama administration is considering a plan to use U.S. military trainers to help increase the capabilities of the Syrian rebels, in a move that would greatly expand the current CIA training being done quietly in Jordan, US officials have said.

The officials said no decision had been made, but that discussions were going on at high levels of the government. It comes as the Obama administration prods Congress to authorise limited military strikes against the Syrian government in retaliation for a deadly Aug. 21 chemical weapons attack.

The proposal to use the U.S. military to train the rebels – something the administration has resisted through more than two years of civil war – would answer the demands of some lawmakers, including Sen. John McCain, a leading Republican, to do more to train and equip the Syrian opposition.

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84% around the globe expect climate change to produce natural disasters

Eco Watch - A worldwide survey commissioned by the multinational insurance group Swiss Re to assess public attitudes towards risk has shown that climate change is ranked high on the list of people’s concerns.

The survey, conducted on behalf of Swiss Re by the Gallup polling organization, involved 22,000 people aged 15 years and older across five continents. People were asked what concerns them most—whether it’s the economy, aging, climate change, natural disasters, energy issues or questions about food supplies.

While almost all respondents expressed fears about the economic future in their countries, concern about climate change and natural disasters was also widespread, with 84 percent of respondents anticipating climate change being responsible for more natural disasters in the future.

The policy of governments does not fully address the risks faced today and by future generations, respondents said. In particular, more than 90 percent of those surveyed want to see governments doing more to ensure more efficient energy use.

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A few reasons to save Head Start

American Progress:

• Early childhood education pays for itself. Studies show that high-quality early learning programs pay a return of $7 for every $1 invested.
• Kids who attend Head Start have higher literacy rates, better cognitive skills, and fewer behavioral problems than kids who don’t attend these programs.
• Kids who attend Head Start are less likely to be in special education and more likely to graduate from high school.
• Head Start programs provide kids with essential dental, nutritional, and medical services so that they are healthy and ready to start school.

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Obama's new ally on Syria

Think Progress - A leading neoconservative pundit is calling on Republican lawmakers to support the authorization of military force  on Syria and suggests that “soon after” the Syria measure passes, Republicans should consider another AUMF for Iran.

Bill Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard and the standard bearer for right-wing hawks, said that congressional Republicans should ignore their disgust for President Obama, take the “statesmanlike” stance and support Obama’s plan for a limited military strike on Syria.

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Walmart workers plan Black Friday walkout

Josh Eidelson, Nation - In twelve weeks, on the busiest shopping day of the year, Walmart workers will mount what may be the biggest-ever US strike against the retail giant. In an e-mailed statement, a campaign closely tied to the United Food & Commercial Workers union promised “widespread, massive strikes and protests for Black Friday,” the day after Thanksgiving. A Black Friday strike last year, in which organizers say over 400 workers walked off the job, was the largest and highest-profile action to date by the union-backed non-union workers’ group OUR Walmart, and the largest US strike in the company’s five-decade history.

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U.S. can't link chemical attacks to Assad

Reuters - With the United States threatening to attack Syria, U.S. and allied intelligence services are still trying to work out who ordered the poison gas attack on rebel-held neighborhoods near Damascus.

No direct link to President Bashar al-Assad or his inner circle has been publicly demonstrated, and some U.S. sources say intelligence experts are not sure whether the Syrian leader knew of the attack before it was launched or was only informed about it afterward.

While U.S. officials say Assad is responsible for the chemical weapons strike even if he did not directly order it, they have not been able to fully describe a chain of command for the August 21 attack in the Ghouta area east of the Syrian capital.

It is one of the biggest gaps in U.S. understanding of the incident, even as Congress debates whether to launch limited strikes on Assad's forces in retaliation.

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USDA's threat to small farmers

Michael Tabor & Nick Maravell, Gazette, MD -  Each week at farm stands in the Maryland area, we try to explain a peculiar situation to our customers. On the one hand, they want to buy our fresh fruit and vegetables. However, I tell them, that in a few years, these will all be illegal to sell!

Why? Because they have some degree of dirt and bacteria on them. The strawberries for instance, have some trace amount of straw and soil on them. As do the tomatoes, beans and cucumbers. We do rinse them before leaving the farm — but we won’t put them through a disinfectant bath nor pack them in antiseptic plastic containers and put “PLU” labels on them. That’s not what consumers want at a farm market — nor is it something we’ll ever be able to do.

Regulations for a new food law — FSMA, the Food Safety Modernization Act — administered by the FDA are currently in the process of being finalized. Although the act originally had protections for family farmers like myself, we see those being ignored or phased out over time.

Common sense and following the data of recent food safety scares lead us to a very strong conclusion: the further the food travels from the farm to the consumer, the more opportunities it has to become a food safety problem. The current cyclospora food poisoning problem in bagged salads is a good example.

This is one reason why 20 million consumers come to farmers markets like ours and want fresh produce from our fields — preferably grown without pesticides, herbicides or GMO seeds. And sadly, protecting consumers from these synthetic perils is not addressed by FSMA.

Nor does the FDA address what is common sense to many scientists, doctors and parents: our bodies are dependent on the good germs and bacteria. If anything, rather than developing the antiseptic globalized industrial-style food system FSMA seeks, we should be searching for ways to increase the amount of good bacteria in our bodies. In fact, fecal implants to repopulate the gut with bacteria are not science fiction — the medical profession is now performing them every day.

So, why is this bad science becoming the law of the land?

First, it is partially due to corporate profit. Corporations depend on a global supply chain, and in doing so they are finding it increasingly difficult to deliver safe food. At the same time they are losing market share to the local food systems that customers are demanding — witness the sharp increase in farmers markets, community supported agriculture and restaurants offering “farm-to-fork” menus.

To avoid legal liability, the corporations want to legitimize an industrial approach to sterilizing everything, without regard to the unnecessary and costly burden placed on local farmers. If your local farmer goes out of business trying to comply with the costs of hundreds of pages of new federal food safety regulations, that just leaves more customers without a local alternative.

Second, there is the misguided advocacy of the consumer organizations, like Center for Science in the Public Interest. They mean well, but they think that throwing regulatory words and paperwork burden at a problem will solve it. This approach is overly legalistic, and it ignores the realities of nature and the practical fact that over-regulating a sector that is not causing a problem — small farmers — cannot possibly lead to safer food.

And, finally, there is this administration’s commitment to the biotech industry. It’s no accident that FDA’s deputy commissioner responsible for food safety, Michael R. Taylor, is a former Monsanto vice president. That partially explains why the “safe food” mandate does nothing to protect us from genetically engineered food, and the harsh chemicals that are necessarily paired with it.

It will, however, put many of us farmers, who are committed to fresh, healthy and sustainably grown food, out of business.

We can all see the future. It is those antiseptic, theoretically bacteria-free plastic containers that will soon become the only way we will be able to shop for all of our produce.

And that should be an issue of public outrage.

Michael Tabor has been farming for 41 years and supplies Baltimore-area universities and colleges with GMO-free, sustainably grown produce. He is being honored this September for running his farm stand in the Adams Morgan neighborhood in Washington, D.C., for 40 years.

Nick Maravell serves as a farmer representative on the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board and has farmed organically since 1979, raising grain, livestock and vegetables

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