The Unknown Candidate

Thursday, August 10, 2006

The Chutzpah Of Joe Lieberman

A little chutzpah goes a long way, but when you overdo it...you get Joe Lieberman: a disgrace to Democrats, a Bush sycophant of the most obvious sort, a self-righteous hypocrite, and, when you get right down to it-- gasp!--a Republican in Democrat's clothing.

Enough. It's time for The Krug Man to take some swings at "Sore Loser-man." He hits a home run in today's NY Times op ed.

Photo credit: Senator Joseph Lieberman (D-CT), with his wife Hadassah at his side (L), takes the stage to concede the democratic primary election in Hartford, August 8, 2006. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)

Nonsense and Sensibility
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

After Ned Lamont’s victory in Connecticut, I saw a number of commentaries describing Joe Lieberman not just as a “centrist” — a word that has come to mean “someone who makes excuses for the Bush administration” — but as “sensible.” But on what planet would Mr. Lieberman be considered sensible?

Take a look at Thomas Ricks’s “Fiasco,” the best account yet of how the U.S. occupation of Iraq was mismanaged. The prime villain in that book is Donald Rumsfeld, whose delusional thinking and penchant for power games undermined whatever chances for success the United States might have had. Then read Mr. Lieberman’s May 2004 op-ed article in The Wall Street Journal, “Let Us Have Faith,” in which he urged Mr. Rumsfeld not to resign over the Abu Ghraib scandal, because his removal “would delight foreign and domestic opponents of America’s presence in Iraq.”

And that’s just one example of Mr. Lieberman’s bad judgment. He has been wrong at every step of the march into the Iraq quagmire — all the while accusing anyone who disagreed with him of endangering national security. Again, on what planet would Mr. Lieberman be considered “sensible”? But I know the answer: on Planet Beltway.

Many of those lamenting Mr. Lieberman’s defeat claim that they fear a takeover of our political parties by extremists. But if political polarization were really their main concern, they’d be as exercised about the primary challenge from the right facing Lincoln Chafee as they are about Mr. Lieberman’s woes. In fact, however, the sound of national commentary on the Rhode Island race is that of crickets chirping.

So what’s really behind claims that Mr. Lieberman is sensible — and that those who voted against him aren’t? It’s the fact that many Washington insiders suffer from the same character flaw that caused Mr. Lieberman to lose Tuesday’s primary: an inability to admit mistakes.

Imagine yourself as a politician or pundit who was gung-ho about invading Iraq, and who ridiculed those who warned that the case for war was weak and that the invasion’s aftermath could easily turn ugly. Worse yet, imagine yourself as someone who remained in denial long after it all went wrong, disparaging critics as defeatists. Now denial is no longer an option; the neocon fantasy has turned into a nightmare of fire and blood. What do you do?

You could admit your error and move on — and some have. But all too many Iraq hawks have chosen, instead, to cover their tracks by trashing the war’s critics.

They say: Pay no attention to the fact that I was wrong and the critics have been completely vindicated by events — I’m “sensible,” while those people are crazy extremists. And besides, criticizing any aspect of the war encourages the terrorists.

That’s what Joe Lieberman said, and it’s what his defenders are saying now.

Now, it takes a really vivid imagination to see Mr. Lieberman’s rejection as the work of extremists. I know that some commentators believe that anyone who thinks the Iraq war was a mistake is a flag-burning hippie who hates America. But if that’s true, about 60 percent of Americans hate America. The reality is that Ned Lamont and those who voted for him are, as The New York Times editorial page put it, “irate moderates,” whose views are in accord with those of most Americans and the vast majority of Democrats.

But in his non-concession speech, Mr. Lieberman described Mr. Lamont as representative of a political tendency in which “every disagreement is considered disloyal” — a statement of remarkable chutzpah from someone who famously warned Democrats that “we undermine the president’s credibility at our nation’s peril.”

The question now is how deep into the gutter Mr. Lieberman’s ego will drag him.

There’s an overwhelming consensus among national security experts that the war in Iraq has undermined, not strengthened, the fight against terrorism. Yet yesterday Mr. Lieberman, sounding just like Dick Cheney — and acting as a propaganda tool for Republicans trying to Swift-boat the party of which he still claims to be a member — suggested that the changes in Iraq policy that Mr. Lamont wants would be “taken as a tremendous victory by the same people who wanted to blow up these planes in this plot hatched in England.”

In other words, not only isn’t Mr. Lieberman sensible, he may be beyond redemption.

Photo credit: Paul Krugman. (The New York Times)

Revenge of the Irate Moderates - New York Times

Excerpts: Lieberman's Concession Speech - New York Times

In Setback, Lieberman Calls for Round 2, Despite Obstacles in His Party - New York Times

Lieberman to Stay in Race After Defeat - New York Times

Lieberman, on the Offensive, Links Terror Threat and Iraq - New York Times

Lawrence O'Donnell: Joe Lieberman Will Drop Out.

Technorati tags: Paul Krugman, New York Times, Joseph Lieberman, Sore Loserman, Ned Lamont, Politics, Dick Cheney, Iraq, news, commentary, op ed

Further Friedman Fabrications

Tom Tom continues to spin spin tales; this time the story is that Hezbollah is wholly responsible for starting the current war with Israel. "After all," says Friedman, "it was Iran, Nasrallah’s master, that ordered up this war to distract the U.N." from imposing sanctions on her.

Nice story, but it leaves out reports that Israel had planned for this war for years and, with the U.S. egging them on, used the kidnapping of a few soldiers as an excuse to dust off those plans and put them into action. Never mind that Israel had kidnapped civilians prior to the Palestinian and Hezbollah kidnappings.

Tom Tom further ignores the fact that the U.S. is the only country preventing an immediate cease fire between Lebanon & Israel, in an effort to draw Syria and Iran into the fray as part of their long standing plan to reorder the Middle East to their own liking.

Tom, I honestly don't know how you can keep writing this stuff, knowing your fictions prolong immoral wars and contribute to untold deaths. How the Hell do you and your editors sleep at night?

The Morning After the Morning After
By Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times

With every war there are two days to keep in mind when the guns fall silent: the morning after, and the morning after the morning after. America, Israel and all those who want to see Lebanon’s democracy revived need to keep their eyes focused on the morning after the morning after.

Here’s why.

The only way that the fighting in south Lebanon will be brought to a close is if all the parties accept a cease-fire and the imposition of a robust international peacekeeping force, led by France, along the Israel-Lebanon border — supplanting Hezbollah.

The morning after that cease-fire goes into effect, everyone knows what will happen: Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah — no matter how battered his forces and how much damage his reckless war has visited on Lebanon — will crawl out of his bunker and declare a “great victory.” Hezbollah, he will say, fought the Israeli Army to a standstill inside Lebanon and rained rockets on northern Israel. Meanwhile, military analysts everywhere will write that Israel has “lost its deterrence” vis-à-vis Arab forces, and blah, blah, blah.

Sorry, been there, heard that, and I don’t buy it. What matters in war, alas, is the balance of destruction on the ground and the political weight it exerts over time.

On the morning after the morning after, Lebanese war refugees, who had real jobs and homes, will start streaming back by the hundreds of thousands, many of them Shiites. Tragically, they will find their homes or businesses badly damaged or obliterated. Yes, they will curse Israel. But they and other Arabs will also start asking Nasrallah publicly what many are already asking privately:

“What was this war all about? What did we get from this and at what price? Israel has some roofs to repair and some dead to bury. But its economy and state are fully intact, and it will recover quickly. We Lebanese have been set back by a decade. Our economy and our democracy lie in ruins, like our homes. For what? For a one-week boost in ‘Arab honor?’ So that Iran could distract the world’s attention from its nuclear program? You did all this to us for another country?”

As Michael Young, opinion editor of The Beirut Daily Star, put it an article in Slate: “Hezbollah’s ... test will be to rapidly alleviate the suffering in its own community and, therefore, avoid losing its base. The party still has substantial backing among its coreligionists, and it is not about to see this disappear. But soon the fate of the hundreds of thousands of Shiites now living in schools, tent cities, and even public parks will be an overriding concern for Nasrallah. Many have fled areas partly or wholly destroyed, to which they might not return for months or years. ... Hezbollah will have to provide funding for reconstruction and rehabilitation that is likely to run into the billions of dollars. ... The party will have a monumental task to revive not only Shiite morale but confidence that Hezbollah can take care of its own. ... Even the party’s most optimistic interpretation of the current war — that it is a heroic achievement — will not spare it having to tiptoe very carefully through Shiite trauma.”

Moreover, if and when a French-led international force is placed along the Israel-Lebanon border, it will be a big loss for Hezbollah. The Shiite militia will no longer be able to directly touch Israel and start a war for Iran or Syria whenever it chooses. And, if Hezbollah tried to lob missiles over the peacekeeping zone, or penetrate it, it would clash with forces from France, Italy and Turkey, the likely peacekeepers. That means Hezbollah, Iran and Syria would not be able to hurt Israel without also hurting their own relations with the European Union.

Israel needs to keep its eyes on the prize. It’s already inflicted enormous damage on Hezbollah and its community, but Nasrallah will only have to pay the full price for inviting all that destruction once the guns fall silent on the morning after the morning after. So let’s get there as soon as possible. That will deter him. What would deter him even more, though, would be if the U.N. would go ahead and impose sanctions on Iran for its illicit nuclear bomb program. After all, it was Iran, Nasrallah’s master, that ordered up this war to distract the U.N. from doing just that. It would be nice to say to Iran: You ravaged Hezbollah for nothing.

Beyond those two limited objectives, there’s no storybook ending for Israel in Lebanon, and it shouldn’t throw more good lives after some elusive knockout blow. It’s just not that kind of neighborhood. As they say in the movies, “Forget it, Jake. It’s Chinatown.”

Photo credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Deflating Middle East Extremism
"We have to get past the anti-Israel rhetoric of Hamas and Hezbollah and start talking to them."

Technorati tags: Tom Friedman, New York Times, Lebanon, Israel, Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, news, commentary, op ed

JFK Speaks: "The President and the Press"

JFK speaks truth to the current power in Washington.
Close your eyes. Listen to the Speech. Then listen and watch the video.

If you are too young to remember JFK's presidency, perhaps you can understand how he inspired a generation to work to make the world a better place .... and how sorely he is missed today.

Hat tip to: Open Your Mind's Eye

Technorati tags: John F. Kennedy, Media, Press, Secret Societies, Open Government, Speeches, Democracy, Freedom, news, commentary, video

Fuel For The Fear-Mongers' Fire

Isaiah J. Poole writes:

"Only the most paranoid might conclude that today’s arrests in Britain in connection with an alleged terror plot was timed to coincide with Republican mobilization for the fall elections. But you have to concede that the timing is at least convenient...."

Count me among the "most paranoid." After so many lies from the Fear Monger in Chief and his Merry Band of Spinners, I find myself skeptical as to the truth of any statement coming from Chertoff, Gonzales, Cheney or any other administration source. Since the Brits have been one hundred percent in cahoots with BushCo since the regime's inception, I take any statements from their intelligence officers with another grain of salt.

Given my confessed paranoia, I would consult a shrink except that, deep down, I know I am not suffering from any form of mental illness. I am merely reacting as any sane person would to statements made by those in power who have proven to distort the truth not once, but over and over again.

Poole's article only confirmed that I am not alone in my suspicions of fear-mongering and that my distrust is, at the very least, justified.

BushCo has shown that they will stop at nothing to accomplish their ulterior goal of World Empire. Another lie intended to manipulate public sentiment--especially before an election when they are bogged down in unpopular war? Big deal. They create their own reality, remember?

MUST READ: Red Alert For Staged Government Terror Attack

Arianna Huffington: Beyond Chutzpah: Cheney Implies Terrorists Are Happy Lieberman Lost

Russell Shaw: On Heels of Joe's Defeat, Terror Plot's Revealed: Is There a Connection?

Technorati tags: TomPaine.com, Isaiah J. Poole, Terror Plot, Britain, Republican National Committee, Politics, Spin, Cheney, Bush, Tony Snow, news, commentary

VIDEO: Tomas Young Goes to Washington

A Video Report by Geoffrey Millard and Scott Galindez

On the same day that Iraqi prime minister Jawad al-Maliki came to Washington, so did Iraq war veteran Tomas Young. Tomas, in a wheelchair that was being held together with duct tape, came with Phil Donahue. Donahue is filming a documentary about Tomas and the questions he has for Congress and the president. Truthout was there as members of Congress, including Senator Robert Byrd, came out to meet Tomas.

Click on the video (above) to view in Quicktime (DSL) or click here for other viewing options.

Also see:

Geoffrey Millard | US Peace Delegation and Iraqi Officials Open Dialogue
Geoffrey Millard writes, "On the 9th of August, what began as the words to a bad joke ('A priest, a shrimp boat captain, an ex-diplomat, and an ex-soldier walk into a room of Iraqis ...') ended as a successful mission of diplomatic communication that found four of its members continuing on into Lebanon to do humanitarian work, including being human shields if necessary."
Sara Rich | The Waiting Game
Sara Rich writes, "It has now been 60 traumatic days since my daughter - who signed up with the Army as an MP, and after bravely serving one tour in Iraq, chose to go AWOL rather than engage in the two more tours to Iraq that awaited her - was forcibly taken from our home in handcuffs. Like many soldiers, she was suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. What we didn't know, what she couldn't tell us, is that she was also suffering military sexual trauma."
Baghdad Morgue Tallies 1,815 Bodies in July
Figures compiled by the city morgue indicated Wednesday that the number of killings in the Iraqi capital reached a new high last month, and the US military said a new effort to bring security to Baghdad will succeed only if Iraqis "want it to work." The Baghdad morgue took in 1,815 bodies during July, according to the facility's assistant manager, Abdul Razzaq al-Obeidi. The previous month's tally was 1,595. Obeidi estimated that as many as 90 percent of the total died violent deaths.

Technorati tags: Truthout, Geoffrey Millard, Scott Galindez, Tomas Young, Washington, Robert Byrd, Phil Donahue, Veterans Against the War, Iraq, Video, news, commentary

Chomsky Unplugged

Apocalypse near
By Merav Yudilovitch

Following intellectuals' letter, Prof. Noam Chomsky explains his doctrine, discusses danger of Israel's nukes compared to 'Iranian threat,' global media's role in escalating Mideast conflict and US's place in picture.

08/09/06 "Ynet" -- -- Last week, a group of renowned intellectuals published an open letter blaming Israel for escalating the conflict in the Middle East. The letter, which mainly referred to the alignment of forces between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, caused a lot of anger among Ynet and Ynetnews readers, particularly due to its claim that the Israeli policy's political aim is to eliminate the Palestinian nation.

The letter was formulated by art critic and author John Berger and among its signatories were Nobel Prize winner, playwright Harold Pinter, linguist and theoretician Noam Chomsly, Nobel Prize laureate Jos é Saramago, Booker Prize laureate Arundhati Roy, American author Russell Banks, author and playwright Gore Vidal, and historian Howard Zinn.

Prof. Chomsky, you claimed that the provocation and counter-provocation all serve as a distraction from the real issue. What does it mean?

You won't want to miss Chomsky's answer to his question and others. Read more.

Wednesday, August 09, 2006

Spin, Davey, Spin

(Click on Cartoon for Larger View)

In todays NY Times op ed David Brooks makes a lame attempt to redefine Lieberman's defeat in the Connecticut primary as the emergence of a viable third major party in America--the McCain-Lieberman Party. Say what?

It's almost funny, that, according to Brooks, this third party represents the "center" of the political spectrum. Exactly what is centrist about two neo-con, pro war politicians who have staunchly supported BushCo's pre-emptive war policy--no matter what. I'd say that on the foreign policy front, at least, these two are so far to the right that they're radical.

The Connecticut primary was first and foremost a rejection of the Bush war policy--which, by the way, has been accompanied by a power grab and concurrent attack on our rights and freedoms at home and a complete disregard for the will of the American people. Congress was complicit in this policy and voters are merely exercising their rights to refuse to vote for those who arrogantly fail to represent them and support those who want to change the current course.

Sorry, Brooks, but the message coming out of Connecticut is that Democrats (and I suspect a fair amount of Republicans and Independents as well) are tired of the bogus, never-ending war on terrorism and the complete lack of representation of average Americans in Washington. The message is this: Americans want universal health care, 'secure'--not privatized-- social security, medicare, education reform, environmental reforms, a responsible alternative energy plan and an end to congressmen who put corporate lobby-interests over those of ordinary taxpayers.

I'd also like for someone to please tell me when support for traditional Democratic values like education, healthcare, women's rights, civil rights, and the environment became "left wing" or "liberal" instead of "centrist" Democratic causes. Guess what? They're not radical ideas at all. They are the issues Democrats have historically embraced without shame. Just as they once wore the word "liberal" proudly.

What happened? Spin. Lots and lots of Rovian media spin. The sad thing is, the media's liberal bashing never would have worked if the Democrats had stood up to the initial denigration by pointing out that without liberals we would not have had the clean air and water standards, worker safety protections, social security, the civil rights movement, the equal rights movement, the womens movement, birth control, the Voting Rights Act, federally subsidized student loans, the Freedom of Information Act, and on and on and on.

Now, the American people are finally letting the hacks in Washington know that they have had enough. Enough lies. Enough wars. Enough spin. And not enough real help when and where they need it.

You and your specious argument is twisting in the wind, Davey-boy.

Party No. 3
By David Brooks
The New York Times

There are two major parties on the ballot, but there are three major parties in America. There is the Democratic Party, the Republican Party and the McCain-Lieberman Party.

All were on display Tuesday night.

The Democratic Party was represented by its rising force — Ned Lamont on a victory platform with the net roots exulting before him and Al Sharpton smiling just behind. The Republican Party was represented by its collapsing old guard — scandal-tainted Tom DeLay trying to get his name removed from the November ballot. And the McCain-Lieberman Party was represented by Joe Lieberman himself, giving a concession speech that explained why polarized primary voters shouldn’t be allowed to define the choices in American politics.

The McCain-Lieberman Party begins with a rejection of the Sunni-Shiite style of politics itself. It rejects those whose emotional attachment to their party is so all-consuming it becomes a form of tribalism, and who believe the only way to get American voters to respond is through aggression and stridency.

The flamers in the established parties tell themselves that their enemies are so vicious they have to be vicious too. They rationalize their behavior by insisting that circumstances have forced them to shelve their integrity for the good of the country. They imagine that once they have achieved victory through pulverizing rhetoric they will return to the moderate and nuanced sensibilities they think they still possess.

But the experience of DeLay and the net-root DeLays in the Democratic Party amply demonstrates that means determine ends. Hyper-partisans may have started with subtle beliefs, but their beliefs led them to partisanship and their partisanship led to malice and malice made them extremist, and pretty soon they were no longer the same people.

The McCain-Lieberman Party counters with constant reminders that country comes before party, that in politics a little passion energizes but unmarshaled passion corrupts, and that more people want to vote for civility than for venom.

On policy grounds, too, the McCain-Lieberman Party is distinct. On foreign policy, it agrees with Tony Blair (who could not win a Democratic primary in the U.S. today): The civilized world faces an arc of Islamic extremism that was not caused by American overreaction, and that will only get stronger if America withdraws.

On fiscal policy, the McCain-Lieberman Party sees a Republican Party that will not raise taxes and a Democratic Party that will not cut benefits, and understands that to avoid bankruptcy the country must do both.

On globalization, the McCain-Lieberman Party believes that free trade reduces poverty but that government must invest in human capital so people can compete. It believes in comprehensive immigration reform.

The McCain-Lieberman Party sees Democrats in the grip of teachers’ unions and Republicans who let corporations write environmental rules. It sees two parties that depend on the culture war for internal cohesion and that make abortion a litmus test.

It sees two traditions immobilized to trench warfare.

The McCain-Lieberman Party is emerging because the war with Islamic extremism, which opened new fissures and exacerbated old ones, will dominate the next five years as much as it has dominated the last five. It is emerging because of deep trends that are polarizing our politics. It is emerging because social conservatives continue to pull the GOP rightward (look at how Representative Joe Schwarz, a moderate Republican, was defeated by a conservative rival in Michigan). It is emerging because highly educated secular liberals are pulling the Democrats upscale and to the left. (Lamont’s voters are rich, and 65 percent call themselves liberals, compared with 30 percent of Democrats nationwide.)

The history of third parties is that they get absorbed into one of the existing two, and that will probably happen here. John McCain and Hillary Clinton will try to reconcile their centrist approaches with the hostile forces in their own parties. And maybe they will succeed (McCain has a better chance, since the ideologues on the right feel vulnerable while the ideologues on the left, perpetually two years behind the national mood, think the public wants more rage).

But amid the hurly-burly of the next few years — the continuing jihad, Speaker Pelosi, a possible economic slowdown — the old parties could become even more inflamed. Both could reject McCain-Liebermanism.

At that point things really get interesting.

Photo credit: David Brooks. (The New York Times)
Cartoon: By Tony Auth/Slate

The Anti-Bush Movement

Jury Out on Lieberman Effect

House Incumbents at Risk, Poll Finds

Voter Anger That Cuts Both Ways

The Death of Triangulation

RJ Eskow: Detective Story: Has Rove Been Guiding the Lieberman Campaign All Along?

Arianna Huffington: Joe Lieberman: Spoiler-ed Rotten

Technorati tags: David Brooks, The New York Times, Politics, US Government, Connecticut Primary, Joe Lieberman, Lamont, McCain, DeLay, Democratic Party, Republican Party, news, commentary, op ed

Deceit Beyond Bounds

By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

It sure looks like American voters want change. And here’s an example of the kind of thing they want a change from.

In a move that was typically and patently deceitful, Republicans in Congress tried to pass a minimum wage measure last week in which the biggest winners would have been some of the wealthiest people in America.

The G.O.P. has tended to fight minimum wage hikes the way the Hatfields battled the McCoys. But suddenly this summer, Republicans discovered minimum wage legislation that they could truly love. G.O.P. leaders in Congress linked a modest increase in the minimum wage to a whopping decrease in the estate tax. The cut in the estate tax would have cost the government at least $268 billion in revenue over the next decade, and probably a lot more.

In exchange for this estate tax bonanza for the fabulously wealthy, the G.O.P. was willing to approve a $2.10-an-hour increase, stretched over three years, in the miserly $5.15-an-hour minimum wage. It was made clear that any Democrats who dared oppose this raid on the Treasury would be targeted by Republicans as obstructionists blocking a sorely needed wage hike for the lowest-paid workers in the nation.

I’m for an increase in the minimum wage and against a cut in the estate tax. But that’s not the point here. The point is the extent to which the Republican Party is willing to engage in deceit to try and achieve ends it could not achieve any other way. The latest incarnation of the Republican Party has taken deceit in government and politics to dangerous new extremes, and it’s time to call a halt to it.

The war in Iraq will be remembered as one of the greatest exercises in systematic governmental deceit in U.S. history. But the Iraq fiasco is just the most stunning and tragic example of a style of governing and politicking that has become second nature to the Bush administration and much of the national Republican establishment.

This is a crowd that will tell you with a straight face that it is creating a wondrous new world in the Middle East, that it is doing what it can to stem the ominous tide of global warming, that the United States does not engage in torture, that the administration carefully guards the civil liberties of ordinary Americans, and that it does not favor the wealthy over poor and working people.

These are folks who will tell you that up is down, and punish you for insisting that up is up.

It is in that same deceitful and vengeful spirit that the party is now attacking Democratic senators who managed to hold fast, under the leadership of the minority leader, Harry Reid, to defeat the legislation that cynically tied the estate tax windfall to an increase in the minimum wage.

The National Republican Senatorial Committee declared that Maria Cantwell, a Democratic senator from Washington who voted against the bogus bill, “decided that giving in to pressure from her party’s leadership was more important than voting to raise the federal minimum wage.”

Senator Cantwell, who is up for re-election this year, favors an increase in the minimum wage, as does her party’s leadership. It has been the Democratic Party that has been pushing for years for an increase in the minimum wage, but there is no room for that reality in the G.O.P.’s corrosive culture of deceit.

The buying power of the minimum wage is at a 50-year low. Members of Congress have raised their own pay by $31,600 since the last increase in the minimum wage nine years ago. For Republicans to exploit the plight of workers buried in economic hardship in order to put millions of additional dollars into the portfolios of the already wealthy is beyond egregious.

“If you landed here from Mars and looked at Congress’s agenda,” said Jared Bernstein, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, “you’d think that the problem in America is that rich people don’t have enough money.”

If the Republicans wanted to increase the minimum wage, they could do it in about the time it takes to snap your finger. Democrats would be on board, and the legislative language would not have to be much longer than a paragraph.

They don’t want a minimum wage increase; they want a cut in the estate tax.

Regrettably, there is always a certain amount of deceit in politics. Republicans do not have a monopoly on it. But for a system like ours to work even reasonably well, governmental deceit has to be held within certain limits. Otherwise the system will break down.

Today’s Republican Party has gone far beyond those limits.

Photo credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Bob Herbert, The New York Times, Republican Party, Minimum Wage, Politics, Taxation, Estate Tax, news, commentary, op ed

Tuesday, August 08, 2006

Woo Hoo! Lamont Beats Lieberman!

Just after 11 p.m., Senator Joe Lieberman conceded defeat In Connecticut primary Senate race. That's the good news--for Connecticut--and for Democrats and anti-war Americans in general.

The bad news is that Lieberman vowed to become a spoiler by announcing "his candidacy as an independent in the general election in November."

Gee, Joe. I could have sworn I heard you claim to be "a Democrat" in your speech the other night. So uh, now, you're an independent? So much for Democratic loyalty, huh?

Then again, weren't you were the first Democrat to condemn Clinton and call for his impeachment over a fling with an intern?

Yet you still haven't demanded Bush/Cheney's impeachment even after they've violated the Constitution.

I guess that's the kind of "independent" you are -- huh, Joe? -- the kind that thinks sex rises to the level of "high crimes and misdemeanors" but failing to uphold the Constitution and operating above the law does not. The kind that says you fight for traditional Democratic causes while you vote to go to war in Iraq and to spend billions funding that war (along with the Halliburtons of the world who profit from it). So after all the billions are spent, remind me where you intended to get the money to fund social security, health care, medicare and all the other "democratic" causes you so strongly supported?

Who are you fooling, Joe? Forget about running as an independent and run as the closet, neo-con Republican you really are.

Also see:

It Wasn't About the War by William Rivers Pitt
William Rivers Pitt writes that it wasn't just the war. It was a long, slow slide that eventually tipped Lieberman's applecart. It was a process of insinuation into the cash-and-carry culture of Washington, DC. It was a series of astonishingly bad votes on incredibly important issues. It was, above all, political cowardice; Lieberman attached himself to Bush while Bush was riding high, and was unable to extract himself as Bush's popularity collapsed.

Technorati tags: Joe Lieberman, Ned Lamont, Connecticut, Senate Primary, news, commentary

Friedman's Fallacies

So now Tom Tom wants us to believe that the main reason Israel hasn't completely clobbered Hezbollah and claimed rah rah victory is because they've been caught off guard, pre-occupied with pseudo-American dreams of yuppy-dom and entrepreneurial success. According to Tommy-Boy, Israelis are too consumed with visions of capitalism dancing through their heads to even think about war. Hezbollah, on the other hand, is ever tenacious because war is the only thing they think about.

Just one little item Tommy leaves out. Why does Hezbollah have nothing to dream about other than martyrdom? And what is the U.S./British/Israeli role in inciting that vengeance for war?

Do me a favor, and before you swallow this hogwash, read at least one or two of the articles in this post. If nothing else, you will begin to understand that Hezbollah is not motivated by martyrdom, but by what they perceive to be injustices committed against their people.

There is right and wrong on both sides of this war. Until the media starts looking at the conflict in a more evenhanded, unbiased way, they will be contributing to the hostilities and doing absolutely nothing to end them.

Buffett and Hezbollah
By Thomas L. Friedman
The New York Times

Warren Buffett. The most important thing you need to know about Israel today and how it has performed so far in the war with Hezbollah is Warren Buffett.

Say what? Well, the most talked-about story in Israel, before Hezbollah started this war, was the fact that on May 5, Mr. Buffett, the Berkshire Hathaway chairman and the world’s most successful investor, bought an 80 percent stake in the privately held Israeli precision tools company, Iscar Metalworking, for $4 billion — Mr. Buffett’s first purchase of a company outside America. According to BusinessWeek, as a result of the deal, Iscar’s owners were “likely to pay about $1 billion in capital gains taxes into the Israeli government’s coffers — an unexpected windfall. With the Israeli budget already running a $2 billion surplus, the government is considering slashing value-added tax by one percentage point to 15 percent.”

In May, Israeli papers were filled with pages about how cool it was that Israel had produced a cutting-edge company that Warren Buffett wanted to buy. It was being discussed everywhere, pushing the Tel Aviv stock exchange to an all-time high.

That is where Israel’s head was on the eve of this war — and it explains something I sensed when I visited Israel shortly after the fighting started. Nobody wanted this war, and nobody was prepared for it. Look closely at pictures of Israeli soldiers from Lebanon. There is no enthusiasm in their faces, and certainly no triumphalism. Their expressions tell the whole story: “I just don’t want to be doing this — another war with the Arabs.”

Israeli soldiers were napping when this war started — that’s why they got ambushed — for the very best reasons: They have so much more to do with their lives, and they live in a society that empowers and enables them to do it. (Unfortunately, the Buffett company is in northern Israel and had to be temporarily closed because of rocket attacks.)

Young Israelis dream of being inventors, and their role models are the Israeli innovators who made it to the Nasdaq. Hezbollah youth dream of being martyrs, and their role models are Islamic militants who made it to the Next World. Israel spent the last six years preparing for Warren Buffett, while Hezbollah spent the last six years preparing for this war.

“Israel was not prepared for this war,” said the Israeli political theorist Yaron Ezrahi. “It came upon us like the crash of a meteorite. ... The whole focus of debate in the country before this war was on withdrawal.” The Israeli Army had just taken on its own extremists, the settlers in Gaza, and removed them against their will, added Mr. Ezrahi, “and the country had just elected for the first time a prime minister who promised voters to unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank in return for nothing.”

In the end, Israel will do whatever it has to do to prevail. But what is so troubling for Israelis is that this war is about nothing and everything. That is, Israel got out of Lebanon, and yet Hezbollah keeps coming. It is all about Hezbollah’s need to justify its existence and Iran’s need for a distraction.

What is doubly sad is that Lebanon was getting its act together. Rafik Hariri, the former prime minister, represented a whole new type of Arab leader — one who rose to power by being a builder and an entrepreneur. He understood that Lebanon, freed of Syria, was a country whose youth had the energy and skill to compete anywhere. He thought Lebanon could again be a model of how Arabs can embrace modernity. But Mr. Hariri was murdered, allegedly by Syria, and now Lebanon’s democracy is being murdered by Hezbollah. Once again, in the Arab world, the past buries the future.

Israel mustn’t get sucked into that same grave. Israel needs to get a cease-fire and an international force into south Lebanon — and get out. Israel can’t defeat Hezbollah, it can only hurt it enough to make it think twice about ever doing this again — and it has pretty much done that. It must not destroy any more of Lebanon, which is going to still be its neighbor when the guns fall silent.

Israel wins when Warren Buffett’s company there is fully back in business — not when Nasrallah is out of business. Because that will only happen, not by war, but when Arabs wake up and realize that he is just another fraud, just another Nasser, whose strategy would condemn the flower of Arab youth — who deserve and need so much better — to another decade of making potato chips, not microchips. Nasrallah can win in the long run only if he can condemn the flower of Israel’s youth to the same fate. Don’t let it happen, Israel.

Photo credit: Thomas Friedman. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Thomas Friedman, The New York Times, Israel, Lebanon, Hezbollah, Terrorism, news, commentary, op ed

Monday, August 07, 2006

Ever Wonder Why Dems Don't Support Universal Health Care?

It's simple, really.

Here's why.

Technorati tags: David Sirota, Health Care, Health Care Reform, Universal Health Care, news, commentary, op ed

Sinful Second Homes

By John Tierney
The New York Times

Come August, there are two kinds of people in the world: those with country homes, and those without country homes. If you, unlike me, are in the first group, we need to have an inconvenient talk.

We need to talk about your “carbon footprint,” a concept you may have learned from Al Gore. If you’ve seen “An Inconvenient Truth” or read the best-selling book, you know how strongly he feels about everyone’s duty to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. He advises you to change your light bulbs, insulate your home, cut back on driving and air travel. If you must make a trip, he notes helpfully, “buses provide the cheapest and most energy-efficient transportation for long distances.”

Fine advice, and it would be even better if he journeyed to his lectures exclusively on Greyhound. But he seems to prefer cars and planes. When you tally up his international travel to inspect melting glaciers and the domestic trips between his homes — one in Washington and another in Nashville, not to mention the family farm in rural Tennessee featured in the movie — you’re looking at a Godzilla-sized carbon footprint.

No matter how many fluorescent light bulbs you install in your second home’s basement, you could save a lot more energy by eliminating the whole place. Even if you dutifully shut down each home when you leave it — turning off the electricity, draining the pipes and turning off the heat, etc. — you’re still expending extra energy commuting between your homes. A trip to a weekend house can easily burn more gasoline than a commuter uses all week.

Yet somehow, in all the years I’ve been reading lists of energy-saving tips, I’ve never noticed, “Sell second home.” A cynic might attribute this oversight to a high correlation between fervent environmentalism and second-home ownership — Robert Redford and his place at Sundance, the Kennedys and their compound on the Cape, Laurie David and her home on Martha’s Vineyard, John Kerry’s seaside and mountainside manses.

Granted, some environmentalists deal publicly with their carbon footprints. Gore and David say they offset their energy usage by sponsoring reductions in greenhouse gases through alternative forms of power and energy conservation (like building wind farms and paying farmers to turn methane into electricity). But are “carbon offsets” sufficient compensation? Not to activists like Charles Komanoff, an economic consultant to environmental groups.

He argues in Grist, an environmental magazine, that paying a penny or so per mile to offset the carbon from driving your car isn’t the moral equivalent of riding your bike instead. It’s more like the Catholic Church’s old system of selling indulgences so the rich could avoid something scarier than global warming: purgatory. Quoting Gandhi — “Be the change you want to see in the world” — Komanoff says his fellow environmentalists should stop offering “get out of purgatory free” cards to the rich and instead insist that everyone personally reduce energy use.

I’m not such a purist myself — I’d let the average person salve his conscience with a carbon indulgence. But I’d hold environmentalist preachers like Gore to higher standards, especially when they’re engaging in unnecessary energy use. And since I cannot afford a second home, I can objectively determine it to be unnecessary.

If you’re going to own a second home while ordering everyone else to carpool, you must atone for your excesses, and it’s not enough just to offset the carbon. Gaseous emissions aren’t the only externalities of your home. By owning it, you’re also inducing envy in your neighbors. You’re contributing to the competitive urge that the economist Robert Frank calls “luxury fever.” When you go off for the weekend, those of us left sweltering in the city start lusting for our own second homes. We start dreaming of cutting down carbon-dioxide-absorbing forests to make room for neo-Adirondack cabins with central air and heated pools.

The best way to tamp our enthusiasm — or, I as prefer to put it, to reward our virtue — would be with money. Besides paying farmers not to waste methane, you should be paying us not to build second homes. You could make the payment directly to your neighbors. Or, if you prefer, mail it to me, and I’ll distribute it among the worthiest of my fellow single-home owners.

If you’re short of cash, you could still atone with an in-kind payment: let me stay in your country home while you perform your energy-saving penance back in the city. It wouldn’t have to be a long penance. By my calculations, the month of August would just about wipe out your sins.

Photo credit: John Tierney. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: John Tierney, New York Times, Energy Efficiency, Al Gore, Conservation of Resources, Housing, Environment, news, commentary, op ed

Shrugs for the Dead

By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

This is the tale of two military interventions, of which one happened and the other didn’t.

Three weeks ago, with President Bush supplying the weaponry and moral support, Israel began bombarding Lebanon. The war has killed hundreds of people, galvanized international attention and may lead to an international force of perhaps 20,000 peacekeepers.

Three years ago, Sudan began a genocide against African tribes in its Darfur region. That war has killed hundreds of thousands of people, and it is now spreading. There is talk of U.N. peacekeepers someday, but none are anywhere in sight.

The moral of the story? Never, ever be born to a tribe that is victim to genocide in Africa.

Arabs have often argued that Americans have a double standard in the Middle East: We are more solicitous of casualties in Israel than in Gaza or Lebanon. I think they’re right, for a variety of reasons. (One is that terror attacks are particularly newsworthy; another is that journalists are more likely to live in Jerusalem than Gaza).

But if we have double standards, so do Arabs. I sympathize with their horror at what is happening in Lebanon, but I wish they were just as outraged when Muslims slaughter Muslims in Darfur.

Even the world as a whole has double standards. The U.S. and European countries are working frenetically on a U.N. solution in Lebanon, and there is talk of rapidly sending European peacekeepers to stop the bloodshed. In Darfur, there is nothing like as much interest in what is often considered the ultimate human crime: genocide.

The Tyndall Report, which monitors television network evening news programs, says that since the bombardment of Lebanon began, the crisis there has received more minutes of coverage on average each week than the Darfur genocide has received in total since it began in 2003.

Meanwhile, Darfur continues to drift toward chaos, and the contagion is spreading into Chad and Central African Republic. We may remember Darfur as only the beginning of a much broader calamity in all three countries that ended up claiming millions of lives.

There is , of course, no direct connection between the events in Lebanon and those in Darfur. But indirectly there is : the Arab president of Sudan is manipulating the anti-American feeling sweeping the Arab world to bolster his own authority and defy peacekeeping efforts. In this crazy world of ours, the bombardment of Lebanon has become one more reason to kill African villagers.

So what do we do with these two messes?

In the case of the Middle East, it’s time to use the crisis to push for a major settlement between Israel and Lebanon, even if that means Israel gives up Shebaa Farms and the U.S. engages in direct talks with Syria. Also, President Bush should put much more energy and initiative into the Israeli-Palestinian peace effort.

Sandy Berger, the former national security adviser, says that when he was flying by helicopter to the Israeli-Palestinian talks at Camp David in 2000, President Clinton turned to him and said, “We’re either going to succeed or get caught trying.” In other words, even if the effort to achieve a Middle East peace failed, there would still be a payoff for the U.S. in the court of global public opinion.

“We used to get criticized all the time for being too tough on the Palestinians, on the Arabs,” said Dennis Ross, a Middle East envoy for both President Clinton and the first President Bush. “But nobody ever accused us of not being passionate about trying to resolve the conflict. We got enormous credit for that, because we showed we weren’t indifferent to a core grievance in the region. It’s been an enormous mistake in the last few years to send a message of indifference.”

In the case of Darfur, what we need is precisely the attention that the Lebanon conflict has been getting in the last few weeks; a high-level U.S. envoy would be a start. And while we’re working to get U.N. peacekeepers into Darfur itself, we need to send an international force to the Chad side of the Sudan-Chad border, to stop the genocidal marauders who are invading Chad and destabilizing that country. Chad wants such a force — and it just might keep the catastrophe from spreading across the region.

Both of these cataclysms demand our attention. The killing of children is a tragedy even when they lack geopolitical significance, even when they are simply part of a knotty African genocide that doesn’t make the television news.

Photo credit: Nicholas D. Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Nicholas Kristof, The New York Times, Darfur, Sudan, genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, Bush, American foreign policy, Arabs, Lebanon, Israel, news, commentary, op ed

The Other Side of the MidEast Debate

Given the one-sided, propagandized, mainstream US media, it is incumbent upon each of us to seek out the other side of the Israel/Lebanon story in a quest for fairness, and, ultimately, truth. The following articles present views and facts often conveniently missing from other sources. I highly recommend them:

Noam Chomsky on Israel, Lebanon and Palestine
Do you agree with the argument that Israel's military offensive in Lebanon is "legally and morally justified?" - Noam Chomsky: The invasion itself is a serious breach of international law, and major war crimes are being committed as it proceeds. There is no legal justification.
Israel, Oil and the "planned demolition" of Lebanon�� By Mike Whitney
Israel’s dominance requires that its neighbors endure abject poverty and oppression. By destroying the infrastructure and life-support systems, Israel hopes to eliminate the rise of a potential rival as well as to diminish the ability of the Lebanese resistance to wage war against the Jewish state.
This draft shows who is running America's policy... Israel By Robert Fisk
You could almost hear the Lebanese groan at this draft resolution, a document of such bias and mendacity that a close Lebanese friend read carefully through it yesterday, cursed and uttered the immortal question: "Don't these bastards learn anything from history?"
UN Resolution By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
The top adviser to the Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, talked through the resolution with the US and French teams, while the Israeli Foreign Ministry had its man alongside John Bolton at the UN building in New York.
Junkies of War By Uri Avnery (an Israeli Peace Activist & Author)
Every day on their TV screens tens of millions of Arabs and hundred of millions of Muslims see the atrocious pictures of crushed babies, the sights of the horrible destruction. These are deeply imprinted in the consciousness of the masses and will leave behind them an accumulation of anger and hatred that is far more dangerous than an arsenal of missiles.
Osama Has Won By Brian Cloghley, Counterpunch
Hatred of the US is Now Universal.
VIDEO: George Galloway - Hizbollah Is Not A Terrorist Organization
One mans terrorist is another mans freedom fighter

George Galloway has spoken out in support of Lebanon, saying he believes Hizbollah is justified in defending Lebanon against Israeli attacks . The Respect MP also lambasted media coverage of the war and said the UN resolution means nothing.
Al-mohar editor interview

Israel responded to an unprovoked attack by Hizbullah, right? Wrong - By George Monbiot

Technorati tags: Middle East, Foreign Policy, Lebanon, Israel, UN, Palestine, Hezbollah, news, commentary

Brzezinski on Neo-Cons

To the question, "Doesn't military superiority as a blunt instrument lead to eternal enmity, not security?" Brzezinski responded:

"These neocon prescriptions, of which Israel has its equivalents, are fatal for America and ultimately for Israel. They will totally turn the overwhelming majority of the Middle East's population against the United States. The lessons of Iraq speak for themselves. Eventually, if neo-con policies continue to be pursued, the United States will be expelled from the region and that will be the beginning of the end for Israel as well".

When asked: "'Don't the deaths of so many innocent civilians in Qana in the south of Lebanon -- like the massacre in Haditha, Iraq, by American troops -- send a message to Arabs and Iranians that the 'new Middle East' coming from the U.S. and Israel will amount to occupation, carnage and bloodshed?' Brzezinski replies: 'This is precisely why neocon policies are recklessly dangerous both to America and Israel'. He then continues to explain that 'today it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate the Israeli-Palestinian problem, the Iraq problem and Iran from each other. Neither the United States nor Israel has the capacity to impose a unilateral solution in the Middle East. There may be people who deceive themselves into believing that'."

Photo credit: Zbigniew Brzezinski (Wikipedia)

Technorati tags: Brzezinski, Middle East, Neo-Cons, Israel, Lebanon, United States, Great Britain, news, commentary

Uh Huh.

According to the Pentagon, Pentagon officials didn't lie to Sept. 11 Panel.

The Pentagon investigating a coverup by the Pentagon: How's that for credibility?

Read more.

Technorati tags: The Washington Post, Pentagon, 9/l11 Commission, NORAD, news, commentary

Republican "Values" in Action

Pro-Life GOP Senate Candidate George Allen Caught Owning Stock In Morning After Pill...

Photo credit: George Allen. (Wikipedia)

Technorati tags: Senator George Allen, Pro Life, Morning After Pill, Republicans, news, commentary

Sunday, August 06, 2006

Slick Hilly & Politican Machinations

The Iraq War Enablers
By Bob Herbert
The New York Times

So there was Hillary Rodham Clinton grandstanding for the television cameras last week, giving Donald Rumsfeld a carefully scripted chewing out for his role in the Bush administration’s lunatic war in Iraq.

Casual viewers could have been forgiven for not realizing that Senator Clinton has long been a supporter of this war, and that even now, with the number of pointless American deaths moving toward 2,600, her primary goal apparently is not to find an end game, but to figure out the most expedient political position to adopt — the one that will do the least damage to her presidential ambitions.

Mrs. Clinton is trying to have it both ways. A couple of months ago, she told a gathering in Washington: “I do not think it is a smart strategy either for the president to continue with his open-ended commitment, which I think does not put enough pressure on the new Iraqi government.” She then added, “Nor do I think it is smart strategy to set a date certain.”

Slick Willie has morphed into Slick Hilly, as the carnival of death in Iraq goes on.

Mrs. Clinton is just one of the many supporters of the war who should have known better from the beginning, and who are now (with the wheels falling off the Iraqi cart and public support for the war plummeting) engaged in the tricky ritual of rationalization.

The favored “it’s not my fault” explanation is that the war was always a grand idea, but the Bush gang was so dopey it fouled up a good thing. If only they’d sent in more troops. If only they hadn’t disbanded Saddam’s army. If only they’d turned right instead of left, or left instead of right, Iraq would be an oil-rich, free-market, democratic paradise, even as we speak.

I’m not trying to give a pass to Mr. Rumsfeld, President Bush, Dick Cheney or any of the rest of the war-loving, high-strutting, muscle-flexing men and women in this most dreadful of administrations. These are the individuals who drove us into the flames of Iraq that so far have consumed scores of thousands of lives. But they could have — and should have — been stopped by wiser heads.

This was a war that never should have happened. There was a legitimate war for the United States to fight in Afghanistan, but that was not enough for the administration. The Bush gang wanted a war with Iraq, and less-than-courageous politicians like Mrs. Clinton and many others lined up as enablers to help make that war happen.

Many of the Democrats in Congress supported the war only because they remembered the price paid by party members who stood against the first gulf war, a stand that became an embarrassment when the war was easily won and was therefore popular.

Despite the rationalizations now suddenly on the lips of so many, the problem with the current war in Iraq is not the way it was conducted, but the fact of the war itself. It was launched amid blinding, billowing clouds of deceit. There was never any legitimate reason for the war. Iraq had not attacked the U.S. and there was no imminent threat of attack.

The U.S. went in with guns blazing (“shock and awe”) like Matt Dillon shooting up the dusty streets of Dodge City. Only this was the real world, and the result has been unending tragedy.

The American occupation of Iraq was guaranteed, sooner or later, to provoke a sustained and bloody resistance, and it was inevitable that terror would be the resistance’s most effective tool. It was also certain that if the Shiites were empowered, there would be widespread retaliation for their many years of suffering under Saddam, and then the inevitable counterreaction of the suddenly disempowered Sunnis, and so on.

None of this was a secret. The warnings came from around the world before the first shot was ever fired.

Mrs. Clinton, other Democrats and whatever sensible Republicans may still be out there should be getting together to work out a plan for an orderly withdrawal of American forces from Iraq. This was not a war we were ever going to win. It’s time we brought our involvement to an end.

Americans no longer support this war, and there are few things more empty of meaning than dying in a war that one’s fellow citizens — safe at home — have already given up on.

We went into Iraq with bombs falling and guns blazing, insisting all the while that we were bringing the Iraqis the gifts of freedom and democracy. Instead, we gave them terror, chaos and civil war — in other words, a whole new generation of misery and mass death.

Shock and awe, indeed.

Photo credit: Bob Herbert. (The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Bob Herbert, The New York Times, Iraq, Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Hillary Clinton, Democrats, Republicans, news, commentary, op ed

Krugman's Crystal Ball

The Krug Man paints a not-so-rosy economic scenario for the coming months and years.

Gee. And I thought Georgie-Porgie's tax cuts for his rich buddies where supposed to fix everything ....

Intimations of Recession
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times

These are the dog days of summer, but there’s a chill in the air. Suddenly — really just in the last few weeks — people have starting talking seriously about a possible recession. And it’s not just economists who seem worried. Goldman Sachs recently reported that the confidence of chief executives at major corporations has plunged; a clear majority of C.E.O.’s now say that conditions in the world economy, and the U.S. economy in particular, are worsening rather than improving.

On the face of it, this loss of faith seems strange. Recent growth and jobs numbers have been disappointing, but not disastrous.

But economic numbers don’t speak for themselves. They always have to be interpreted as part of a story. And the latest numbers, while not that bad taken out of context, seem inconsistent with the stories optimists were telling about the U.S. economy.

The key point is that the forces that caused a recession five years ago never went away. Business spending hasn’t really recovered from the slump it went into after the technology bubble burst: nonresidential investment as a share of G.D.P., though up a bit from its low point, is still far below its levels in the late 1990’s. Also, the trade deficit has doubled since 2000, diverting a lot of demand away from goods produced in the United States.

Nonetheless, the economy grew fairly fast over the last three years, mainly thanks to a gigantic housing boom. This boom led directly to unprecedented spending on home construction. It also allowed consumers to convert rising home values into cash through mortgage refinancing, so that consumer spending could run far ahead of families’ incomes. (Americans have been spending more than they earn for the past year and a half.)

Even optimists generally concede that the housing boom must eventually end, and that consumers will eventually have to start saving again. But the conventional wisdom was that housing would have a “soft landing” — that the boom would taper off gradually, and that other sources of growth would take its place. You might say that the theory was that business investment and exports would stand up as housing stood down.

The latest numbers suggest, however, that this theory isn’t working much better on the economic front than it is in Baghdad.

Signs of a deflating housing bubble began appearing a year ago, but for a while it was possible to argue that eliminating a bit of “froth” in the housing market wouldn’t do the overall economy much harm. Now, for the first time, problems in the housing market are starting to seriously reduce economic growth: the latest G.D.P. data show real residential investment falling at an accelerating pace. The latest job numbers show falling employment in home construction, and retail employment has fallen over the past year, suggesting that consumer spending is running out of steam. (Gas at $3 a gallon doesn’t help, either.)

Meanwhile, neither business investment nor exports seem to be growing fast enough to make up for the housing slump.

Now maybe we’ll still manage that soft landing despite a rapidly rising number of unsold houses; or maybe there’s a boom in business investment and/or exports just over the horizon. But based on what we know now, there’s an economic slowdown coming.

This slowdown might not be sharp enough to be formally declared a recession. But weak growth feels like a recession to most people; remember the long “jobless recovery” that followed the official end of the 2001 recession?

And what will policy makers do about a slump, if it happens? A snarky but accurate description of monetary policy over the past five years is that the Federal Reserve successfully replaced the technology bubble with a housing bubble. But where will the Fed find another bubble?

And with the budget still deep in deficit and the costs of the Iraq war still spiraling upward, it’s hard to see Congress agreeing on any significant fiscal stimulus package — especially because history suggests that the Bush administration and Congressional leaders will turn any debate about how to help the economy into yet another attempt to smuggle in tax cuts for the wealthy.

One last thing: the real wages of most workers fell during the “Bush boom” of the last three years. If that boom, such as it was, is already over, workers have every right to ask, “Is that it?”

Photo credit: Paul Krugman. (The New York Times)

Technorati tags: Paul Krugman, New York Times, Recession, Depression, Economy, Consumer Behavior, Housing Bubble, news, commentary, op ed

Stop the Band-Aid Treatment

Regarding the current crisis in Lebanon and Israel, Jimmy Carter writes (in the Washington Post):

"Leaders on both sides ignore strong majorities that crave peace, allowing extremist-led violence to preempt all opportunities for building a political consensus. Traumatized Israelis cling to the false hope that their lives will be made safer by incremental unilateral withdrawals from occupied areas, while Palestinians see their remnant territories reduced to little more than human dumping grounds surrounded by a provocative 'security barrier' that embarrasses Israel's friends and that fails to bring safety or stability.

The general parameters of a long-term, two-state agreement are well known. There will be no substantive and permanent peace for any peoples in this troubled region as long as Israel is violating key U.N. resolutions, official American policy and the international 'road map' for peace by occupying Arab lands and oppressing the Palestinians. Except for mutually agreeable negotiated
modifications, Israel's official pre-1967 borders must be honored. As were all previous administrations since the founding of Israel, U.S. government leaders must be in the forefront of achieving this long-delayed goal.

A major impediment to progress is Washington's strange policy that dialogue on controversial issues will be extended only as a reward for subservient behavior and will be withheld from those who reject U.S. assertions. Direct engagement with the Palestine Liberation Organization or the Palestinian Authority and the government in Damascus will be necessary if secure negotiated settlements are to be achieved. Failure to address the issues and leaders involved risks the creation of an arc of even greater instability running from Jerusalem through Beirut, Damascus, Baghdad and Tehran.

The people of the Middle East deserve peace and justice, and we in the international community owe them our strong leadership and support."

Technorati tags: Middle East, Foreign Policy, Lebanon, Israel, Jimmy Carter, UN, US, Bush, news, Washington Post, commentary, op ed

Best Question of the Year Award Goes to ...

David Corn, of The Nation, who asks:

"Why is it taking the Senate intelligence committee forty times longer to examine how the Bush administration used--or misused--the prewar intelligence on Iraq and WMDs than it took for the United States military to topple Saddam Hussein?"

Photo credit: David Corn. (The Nation)

Technorati tags: Senate Intelligence Committee, Bush, Prewar Intelligence, Pat Roberts, Republican Party, David Corn, The Nation, News, commentary, op ed

Today I Feel Outrage, Today I Feel Shame

Matthew Rothschild of The Progressive puts into words what I feel:

Today, I feel outrage.

Today, I feel shame.

Outrage, because how else can any human being with a conscience feel after what Israel just did in Qana, Lebanon, killing 56 people, including 34 children?

Did you see the pictures?

Did you read the accounts?

Enough to turn anyone’s stomach and to pierce anyone’s heart.

This was a war crime, as Human Rights Watch has noted.

So today I feel outrage.

Today, I feel shame.

And shame, first, as a Jew that a nation of Jews would inflict such horrors, Jews, who are taught to value justice above all.

We survived for 5,700 years so we could do this?

And shame, second, as an American citizen, that our government supplies the weapons that killed the innocent in Qana.

Shame that our government is correctly seen as an accomplice in Israel’s war crimes.

Shame that our government inexcusably failed to insist on an immediate cease-fire long before the Israeli bombs fell on Qana.

Today, I feel outrage.

Today, I feel shame.

Photo credit: Smoke rises from a toppled high rise apartment building in the southern suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, July 31, 2006 (The Chosun Ilbo & Digital Chosun Ilbo)