1. Robert Parry:
U.S. Media Trivializes Campaign 2008
Every four years, during U.S. presidential elections, the same thing
happens, except it’s always a little bit different.
Some clever political operative injects “oppo” into the campaign – some
little “scandal” that supposedly speaks to the “character” of a
candidate – and the press corps obsesses on this marginal issue nearly
to the exclusion of all substantive matters.
This all-consuming event distorts the campaign, turning the targeted
candidate into a laughingstock or someone who isn’t quite American
enough. Pundits pile on with criticism that the guy should have reacted
faster or slower or answered this way or that.
Millions of voters become convinced, amid this intense negativity, that
they simply can’t vote for this loser and the outcome of the election
changes.
Then, in the election aftermath, the American press corps goes through a
period of self-reflection; some excellence-in-journalism group issues a
scathing report about the superficiality of the news coverage; political
journalists vow that in the next election they won’t get suckered again.
Then, the process – which dates back at least to 1988 and Lee Atwater’s
savaging of Michael Dukakis – begins anew, albeit always with some
slightly new twist.
All this might be quite funny if one doesn’t consider the consequences
for the Republic. When historians try to figure out how the most
powerful nation on earth managed to end up under the control of someone
as unfit as George W. Bush for eight years, they will have to take note
of this media phenomenon.
http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3672/
2. Stan Cox: Drive 1,000 Miles or Feed a Person for a Year? The
Biofuels Dilemma
With hungry, angry people taking to the streets in countries on every
continent -- from Morocco to Mexico and Pakistan to the Philippines, and
at least 20 other nations -- the biofuel debate is clearly moving into
new territory.
Arguments for and against using crops to make fuel are no longer
focusing on energy ratios or "independence from foreign oil" or
feel-good environmentalism. The headlines today are about people needing
food to eat -- and right now.
Politicians who once supported biofuel expansion are now backpedaling
fast in the face of irate grocery shoppers in this country and an
increase in hunger across the planet. Representative James McGovern,
D-Mass., was one of the first national lawmakers to raise alarms about
the impact of grain-based biofuels on food prices, telling the New York
Times last month, "If there was a secret vote [in Congress], there is a
pretty large number of people who would like to reassess what we are
doing." Now 24 Republican members of Congress, citing high food prices,
have come out into the open to urge a retreat from the Energy
Independence and Security Act of 2007, which mandates rapid increases in
biofuel production.
State officials across the country are also looking to bail out of the
biofuel rush. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas has formally requested that the
federal government relax biofuel requirements imposed on his state. Also
responding to runaway food costs, the Missouri legislature is
considering a rollback of its own recently passed law requiring that
gasoline must be mixed with a minimum percentage of ethanol. 5.9.08
http://www.alternet.org/water/84628/
3. Dana Milbank: Republicans Vote Against Moms; No Word Yet on
Puppies, Kittens
On Wednesday afternoon, the House had just voted, 412 to 0, to pass H.
Res. 1113, "Celebrating the role of mothers in the United States and
supporting the goals and ideals of Mother's Day," when Rep. Todd Tiahrt
(R-Kan.), rose in protest.
"Mr. Speaker, I move to reconsider the vote," he announced.
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), who has two young daughters, moved to table
Tiahrt's request, setting up a revote. This time, 178 Republicans cast
their votes against mothers.
It has long been the custom to compare a popular piece of legislation to
motherhood and apple pie. Evidently, that is no longer the standard.
Worse, Republicans are now confronted with a John Kerry-esque
predicament: They actually voted for motherhood before they voted
against it.
Republicans, unhappy with the Democratic majority, have been using such
procedural tactics as this all week to bring the House to a standstill,
but the assault on mothers may have gone too far. House Minority Leader
John Boehner, asked yesterday to explain why he and 177 of his
colleagues switched their votes, answered: "Oh, we just wanted to make
sure that everyone was on record in support of Mother's Day."
By voting against it? 5.9.08
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/08/AR2008050802999.html
4. Michael T. Klare:
Who's the superpower now?
Foreign ownership of key nodes of our economy is only one sign of fading
American superpower status. Oil's impact on the military is another.
Every day, the average GI in Iraq uses approximately 27 gallons of
petroleum-based fuels. With some 160,000 American troops in Iraq, that
amounts to 4.37 million gallons in daily oil usage, including gasoline
for vans and light vehicles, diesel for trucks and armored vehicles, and
aviation fuel for helicopters, drones and fixed-wing aircraft. With U.S.
forces paying, as of late April, an average of $3.23 per gallon for
these fuels, the Pentagon is already spending approximately $14 million
per day on oil ($98 million per week, $5.1 billion per year) to stay in
Iraq. Meanwhile, our Iraqi allies, who are expected to receive a
windfall of $70 billion this year from the rising price of their oil
exports, charge their citizens $1.36 per gallon for gasoline.
When questioned about why Iraqis are paying almost a third less for oil
than American forces in their country, senior Iraqi government officials
scoff at any suggestion of impropriety. "America has hardly even begun
to repay its debt to Iraq," said Abdul Basit, the head of Iraq's Supreme
Board of Audit, an independent body that oversees Iraqi governmental
expenditures. "This is an immoral request because we didn't ask them to
come to Iraq, and before they came in 2003 we didn't have all these
needs."
http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2008/05/12/russian_oil/index.html
5. CARL HULSE: Bush and House G.O.P. Team Up to Present Show of
Strength
It was just like the old days. President Bush and House Republican
leaders strode purposefully out of the White House to the waiting
microphones, where the president celebrated their mutual views on
housing, energy, war spending and terrorist surveillance bills taking
shape in Congress.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi at news conference Thursday. The president may veto
three bills from the Democratic-controlled Congress.
“These are dear friends of mine who are committed to doing what’s right
for the country,” Mr. Bush said last Wednesday as House leaders looked
on, sharing the presidential limelight.
But it is not 2002 or even 2006, when Mr. Bush and his Republican allies
could impose their will on Capitol Hill. Instead, what Mr. Bush was
talking about was his determination to veto a string of emerging
Democratic bills, encouraging House Republicans to stand by him in the
effort even though they have to face the voters in November, when he is
packing for Crawford.
The adjustment by the president and House Republicans to the new
Democratic majority in Congress has been rocky. But the final months of
the relationship are threatening to produce a train wreck, given the
president’s veto posture against top Democratic initiatives, the backing
he still commands from Congressional Republicans and the increasing
willingness of Democrats to confront him.
Bush seems willing, in the words of Representative Rahm Emanuel of
Illinois, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, to “go out in a blaze
of vetoes.” 5.10.08
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/10/washington/10memo.html
6. Bill McKibben: Civilization's last chance
All of a sudden it isn't morning in America, it's dusk on planet Earth.
There's a number -- a new number -- that makes this point most
powerfully. It may now be the most important number on Earth: 350. As in
parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
A few weeks ago, NASA's chief climatologist, James Hansen, submitted a
paper to Science magazine with several coauthors. The abstract attached
to it argued -- and I have never read stronger language in a scientific
paper -- that "if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that
on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,
paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will
need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm."
Hansen cites six irreversible tipping points -- massive sea level rise
and huge changes in rainfall patterns, among them -- that we'll pass if
we don't get back down to 350 soon; and the first of them, judging by
last summer's insane melt of Arctic ice, may already be behind us.
So it's a tough diagnosis. It's like the doctor telling you that your
cholesterol is way too high and, if you don't bring it down right away,
you're going to have a stroke. So you take the pill, you swear off the
cheese, and, if you're lucky, you get back into the safety zone before
the coronary. It's like watching the tachometer edge into the red zone
and knowing that you need to take your foot off the gas before you hear
that clunk up front.
In this case, though, it's worse than that because we're not taking the
pill and we are stomping on the gas -- hard. Instead of slowing down,
we're pouring on the coal, quite literally. Two weeks ago came the news
that atmospheric carbon dioxide had jumped 2.4 parts per million last
year -- two decades ago, it was going up barely half that fast.
And suddenly the news arrives that the amount of methane, another potent
greenhouse gas accumulating in the atmosphere, has unexpectedly begun to
soar as well. It appears that we've managed to warm the far north enough
to start melting huge patches of permafrost, and massive quantities of
methane trapped beneath it have begun to bubble forth. 5.11.08
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-op-mckibben11-2008may11,0,2392815.story
7. Helen Thomas: A Picture Worth A Thousand Words
Some readers resented The Washington Post for publishing an Associated
Press photograph of a critically wounded Iraqi child being lifted from
the rubble of his home in Baghdad’s Sadr City “after a U.S. airstrike.”
Two-year-old Ali Hussein later died in a hospital.
As the saying goes, the picture was worth a thousand words because it
showed the true horrors of this war.
Neither side is immune from the killing of Iraqi civilians. But
Americans should be aware of their own responsibility for inflicting
death and pain on the innocent.
Too often in this war, the
news media seem to have tried to shield the public from the suffering
this war has brought to Americans and Iraqis.
It’s not the job of the media to protect the nation from the reality of
war. Rather, it is up to the media to tell the people the truth. They
can handle it. 5.7.08
http://www.wesh.com/helenthomas/16190138/detail.html
The photo is at
http://crankycindy.blogspot.com/2008/05/helen-thomas-is-my-hero.html
8. Saying No to Everything
Even before the House passed a new plan last week to prevent
foreclosures, President Bush threatened to veto the bill, calling it
“overly burdensome.” The bill is not burdensome enough.
Earlier this year, Mr. Bush derided a modest plan to provide $4 billion
to states and localities to buy foreclosed properties, saying that
buying up empty homes helps only “the lenders or the speculators.”
Actually, it protects entire neighborhoods and local economies from the
effects of foreclosures by preventing a greater buildup of unsold homes
and a further drop in prices.
Most egregious, Mr. Bush has resisted efforts to allow bankrupt
homeowners to have their mortgages modified under court protection,
parroting the mortgage industry’s overwrought objections to what is
arguably the best way to avoid preventable foreclosures. Letting
homeowners have the loans modified in court would keep them in their
homes, helping to stabilize the housing market while inflicting the
considerable pain of bankruptcy on both lender and borrower.
Meanwhile, defaults, the first link in the foreclosure chain, are
running at an annual pace of 2.2 million so far this year. 5.12.08
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/12/opinion/12mon2.html
9. Andrew J. Bacevich: The 'Long War' fallacy
Since 2001, the price of oil per barrel has quadrupled, adversely
affecting all but the wealthiest Americans. Efforts to spread democracy
have either stalled or succeeded only in enhancing the standing of
groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. The much-hyped Iraqi nuclear threat
turned out to be illusory. To sustain the overstretched American
imperium, we are accumulating debt at a staggering clip. And with U.S.
soldiers shouldering repetitive combat tours, the strength of our army
slowly ebbs away.
Meanwhile, the immediate danger to the American way of life comes not
from terrorists but from our own adamant refusal to live within our
means. American profligacy, not Islamic radicals, triggered the mortgage
crisis that underlies our current economic distress.
Bluntly, the Long War has proved to be a monumental flop. Yet Gates,
channeling Rumsfeld, would have us believe that perpetual war
constitutes the sole option available to the world's most powerful
nation. This represents a profound failure of imagination. It also
misreads our own history.
The truth is that the United States, with rare exceptions, has
demonstrated little talent for changing the way others live. We have
enjoyed far greater success in making necessary adjustments to our own
way of life, preserving and renewing what we value most. Early in the
20th century, Progressives rounded off the rough edges of the Industrial
Revolution, deflecting looming threats to social harmony. During the
Depression, FDR's New Deal reformed capitalism and thereby saved it.
Here lies the real genius of American politics.
Rumsfeld got it exactly backward. Although we do face a choice, it's not
the one that he described. The actual choice is this one: We can either
persist in our efforts to change the way they live -- in which case the
war of no exits will surely lead to bankruptcy and exhaustion. Or we can
recognize the folly of generational war and choose instead to put our
own house in order: curbing our appetites, paying our bills and ending
our self-destructive dependency on foreign oil and foreign credit.
Salvation does not lie abroad. It's here at home. 5.13.08
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-bacevich13-2008may13,0,2209997.story
10. Marie Cocco:
A Farewell to the ‘Hillary Nutcracker’ and Other Obscenities
As the Democratic nomination contest slouches toward a close, it’s time
to take stock of what I will not miss.
I will not miss seeing advertisements for T-shirts that bear the slogan
“Bros
before Hos.” The shirts depict Barack Obama (the Bro) and Hillary
Clinton (the Ho), and they are widely sold on the Internet.
I will not miss walking past airport concessions selling the
Hillary Nutcracker, a device in which a pantsuit-clad Clinton doll
opens her legs to reveal stainless steel thighs that, well, bust nuts. I
won’t miss television and newspaper stories that make light of the
novelty item.
I won’t miss episodes like the one in which the liberal radio
personality Randi Rhodes called Clinton a “big f---in’ whore” and said
the same about former vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro.
Rhodes was appearing at an event sponsored by a San Francisco radio
station, before an audience of appreciative Obama supporters—one of whom
had promoted the evening on the presumptive Democratic nominee’s
official campaign Web site.
I won’t miss
Citizens United Not Timid (no acronym, please), an anti-Clinton
group founded by Republican guru Roger Stone.
Political discourse will at last be free of jokes like this one, told
last week by magician Penn Jillette on MSNBC: “Obama did great in
February, and that’s because that was Black History Month. And now
Hillary’s doing much better ’cause it’s White B---- Month, right?”
Co-hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski rebuked Jillette.
I won’t miss political commentators (including National Public Radio
political editor Ken Rudin and Andrew Sullivan, the columnist and
blogger) who compare Clinton to the Glenn Close character in the movie
“Fatal Attraction.” In the iconic 1987 film, Close played an independent
New York woman who has an affair with a married man played by Michael
Douglas. When the liaison ends, the jilted woman becomes a deranged,
knife-wielding stalker who terrorizes the man’s blissful suburban
family. Message: Psychopathic home-wrecker, be gone.
There are many reasons why Clinton is losing the nomination contest,
some having to do with her strategic mistakes, others with the
groundswell for “change.” But for all Clinton’s political blemishes, the
darker stain that has been exposed is the hatred of women that is
accepted as a part of our culture. 5.12.08
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080512_a_farewell_to_the_hillary_nutcracker_and_other_obscenities/
11. Len Burman and Greg Leiserson: Scoring McCain’s Tax
Proposals
Senator McCain wants to make government much, much smaller. His
specifics on how are sketchy—eliminate earmarks, programs that don’t
work, waste… But his tax day speech gives us an idea of how much he
wants to shrink the government. A lot. And even more than when we last
blogged on the subject back in February.
He proposes to make President Bush’s tax cuts permanent, repeal the AMT,
double the dependent exemption, raise the estate tax exemption and lower
its rate, make permanent the research credit, and suspend federal gas
taxes this summer. He’d also cut the top corporate tax rate from 35 to
25 percent and allow companies to deduct machinery and equipment
immediately, rather than amortizing them. He also plans to close
corporate tax loopholes worth $30 billion per year.
Even with the loophole closers, these proposals would reduce federal
revenues by about $5.7 trillion over ten years if they could be enacted
immediately.
These estimates make one thing clear. Senator McCain plans a radical
downsizing of government. Slashing pork, earmarks, and underperforming
programs would offset only a fraction of the revenues. Cuts the size of
those he proposes will require slashing discretionary spending and
entitlements, and probably even reining in defense spending. Small
wonder he has backed away from his earlier pledge to balance the
budget—meaning that these tax cuts, like the ones signed by President
Bush, will be paid for by our children. 4.17.08
http://taxvox.taxpolicycenter.org/blog/_archives/2008/4/17/3644448.html
12. Will Bunch:
President Bush committed political treason today
I've seen a lot of sad things in American politics in my lifetime -- the
resignation of a president who became a national disgrace after he
oversaw a campaign of break-ins and cover-ups, another who circumvented
the Constitution to trade arms for hostages, and yet is now hailed as
national hero. And those paled to what we have seen in the last seven
years -- flagrant disregard for the Constitution, the launching of a
"pre-emptive" war on false pretenses, and discussions about torture and
other shocking abuses inside the White House inner sanctum.
But now it's come to this: A new low that I never imagined was even
possible.
President Bush went on foreign soil today, and committed what I consider
an act of political treason: Comparing the candidate of the U.S.
opposition party to appeasers of Nazi Germany -- in the very nation that
was carved out from the horrific calamity of the Holocaust. Bush's
bizarre and beyond-appropriate detour into American presidential
politics took place in the middle of what should have been an occasion
for joy: A speech to Israeli's Knesset to honor that nation's 60th
birthday.
In another irony, this comes from an administration that has already
committed such grave abuses that its former officials are becoming
fearful of traveling overseas, lest they be arrested for war crimes.
Despite the alleged crimes and misdemeanors of the Bush administration,
the Democrats who control the House have until now been restrained in
their use of the impeachment process, hoping that the final eight months
of our American nightmare can pass by quickly. Indeed, one has to wonder
how much of Bush's outrageous statement this morning arose from fear --
fear that a President Obama will go after his wrongdoing in 2009.
Today, it's a whole new ballgame. I believe this treacherous statement
by a U.S. president in Israel is a signal to the Democrats in the House
in Washington, that it's time to play its Constitutional role in ending
this trauma, before even greater acts against the interest of America
are wrongly committed in our name.5.15.08
http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/attytood/President_Bush_committed_treason_today.html
13. Joe Conason: Cindy McCain Flaunts Her Privilege
Double standards are endemic in American journalism. But Cindy McCain,
wife of the Republican presidential candidate, displayed poor taste in
flaunting her family’s special immunity from press scrutiny. Declaring
on NBC’s “Today” that she would “never” release her income tax returns
even if she becomes first lady, the Arizona beer heiress showed no
concern that she and her husband will have to meet the same tests as
other would-be White House occupants—ever.
Unfortunately, Mrs. McCain’s arrogance is probably well founded.
While her personal net worth is estimated somewhere north of $50
million, she can surely rely upon the discretion of right-wing media
organizations and commentators, which so far have given her and her
husband a free pass on the income tax question. In contrast to their
unrelenting demands for absolutely complete disclosure by Bill and
Hillary Clinton over alleged or suspected conflicts of interest, the
so-called conservative media have remained mum about Mrs. McCain.
That silence similarly contrasts with the hell raised four years ago
over Teresa Heinz Kerry’s reluctance to reveal her tax returns alongside
those of her spouse, the Democratic presidential nominee and senator,
John Kerry. Back then The Weekly Standard ran a smirking headline
calling her Mr. Kerry’s “sugar mommy” for a column that salivated over
the “lavish lifestyle” and “vacation homes” to which her tax returns
would draw attention. The Standard editors didn’t even pretend to any
substantive concern. They just wanted to play the politics of envy and
elitism.
These partisan sleuths could scarcely contain their outrage when Mrs.
Kerry, who had inherited the ketchup fortune of her late husband, John
Heinz, cited the privacy of her children as an excuse to resist
disclosure. “Privacy? Oh, come off it,” scoffed the Review. “How can
disclosure of any part of Mrs. Kerry’s personal 1040 relate to her
children, all of whom are now in their thirties?”
Yet Mrs. McCain is getting away with stonewalling on her taxes. “This is
a privacy issue,” she said, and nobody has responded with the mockery
directed at Mrs. Kerry. (Imagine the gale-force media uproar if the
Clintons had refused to release their returns because they claimed to be
protecting Chelsea.) Indeed, the deputy editorial page editor of The
Wall Street Journal, who oversaw those august columns when they howled
for disclosure from Mrs. Kerry in 2004, dismissed any concern over Mrs.
McCain’s tax returns as “a fairly marginal issue.”
The question that remains is whether other major media outlets will
challenge the McCains to meet the same standard of disclosure demanded
from Democratic political families. So far the record is not
encouraging. 5.14.05
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20080514_cindy_mccain_flaunts_her_privilege/
14. Haroon Siddiqui: Failed war on terrorism on display
Some of the disastrous consequences of George W. Bush's foreign policy,
and therefore Stephen Harper's, are on display this week in Israel,
Lebanon, Pakistan and elsewhere.
The president's pledge to create a Palestinian state has now been
downgraded to the creation of a "description" of a state by the end of
his term.
His cure for record oil prices is no more likely to be heeded now than
before. Even if the sheiks heed him they can't buck the market forces
unleashed by his wars abroad and his economic policies at home.
The Lebanese government that he has championed has been rendered
impotent by the Iranian- and Syrian-backed Hezbollah.
When Bush meets Fouad Siniora on Sunday, he will bestow on the Lebanese
prime minister the only gift he knows: arms and military training.
The support is the same as that extended to Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Afghan President
Hamid Karzai and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
The marching order for each is the same: attack fellow citizens who
resist America. Abbas must crush the terrorist Hamas, Maliki the
anti-American insurgents, Karzai the anti-NATO Taliban, and Musharraf
the anti-U.S. militants. 5.15.05
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/425503
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