Obama Could Do More for Mother Earth

Planet Earth Too Big to Fail by Philip Radford
The Obama administration has given itself an extraordinarily powerful tool that could help the president achieve all three of his top domestic goals at once--but only if he has the political moxie to deploy it to its full extent.
That tool is the proposed Endangerment Finding--a formal declaration by the Environmental Protection Agency that global warming indeed threatens human health and welfare. Once the administration issues the final declaration, the Clean Air Act is triggered, giving the administration sweeping authority to decide how to reduce global warming pollution from power plants, vehicles, and other sources, how much, and how fast. According to a groundbreaking new analysis from New York University, the administration could even unilaterally establish a cap-and-trade system very similar to what Congress is considering.

Obama's landmark proposal means that the administration no longer has to go through Congress to make the green economy a reality. No horse-trading with hostile Republicans. No need to throw tens of billions of dollars at the oil and coal industries to win the votes of polluter-friendly members of Congress. No need for sixty votes in the Senate (or even, for that matter, fifty). It will be the EPA looking at the science, listening to public comment and deciding how best to protect the planet, public health and the economy.

With this authority, the administration can do what has been widely dismissed as politically infeasible, but what scientists and others warn is environmentally and economically essential: reducing US global warming pollution from 25 percent to 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2020.

Doing this raises the possibility of giving our children a green and bountiful planet to grow up in and spur the creation of millions of new, high-paying green jobs; it would also go a long way toward achieving Obama's goal of cutting healthcare costs to pay for his $50 billion to $65 billion healthcare plan.

How? Pollution from fossil fuel power plants (mostly coal) adds $167 billion to America's annual healthcare bill, as a result of increased asthma attacks, respiratory diseases, heart attacks, lung cancers, mercury poisoning and other impacts that come with coal's soot and smog. Acting against global-warming pollution would cut other kinds of toxic pollution too, as businesses invest in energy efficiency and clean energy and move away from polluting sources of energy. Add the tens of billions of dollars of additional healthcare costs from auto tailpipe pollution, and the savings are even higher--potentially paying for the entire additional cost of President Obama's healthcare plan.

Despite these benefits, the administration has suggested it might slow-walk its way to climate regulation, in hopes that Congress will produce a bill more precisely suited to greenhouse gas regulation than the Clean Air Act Authority.

We've seen the consequences of this kind of caution and delay before--and they're not pretty. During the Clinton administration, Greenpeace and other environmental groups sued the EPA to require it to issue the endangerment finding. Under pressure from industry, the Clinton administration did nothing and punted the decision to Bush. It took until 2007 for the Supreme Court to decide that the government had to make a decision about the finding and until last week for the government to actually do it. In the meantime, the United States has put a decade's worth of avoidable pollution into the atmosphere.

Furthermore, there's a real risk that Congressional action, even if it comes, will be inadequate. Although the House of Representatives may be moving (slowly) toward passing a climate bill that constitutes a good first step, it still falls somewhat short of what scientists say is necessary. And it's difficult to imagine this Senate, overstuffed as it is with polluter sympathizers, getting sixty votes for anything that reduces emissions to a level even close to what climatologists say gives us a real shot of avoiding a planetary emergency.

But if President Obama learns from the mistakes of his predecessors and quickly establishes aggressive targets, he will set the bar for Congress to meet. If senators want to lower costs for polluters by passing a more efficient system specifically tailored to global warming, they can do so. But to persuade President Obama to sign it, they'll have to make it strong enough so that it at least equals what he does through executive action.

Make no mistake: this is hardball. But for better or worse, hardball is what it's going to take to solve the climate crisis, create a green economy and meet the president's healthcare goals. At the end of the day, President Obama can't afford to let Congress set the schedule--or unilaterally decide the fate of the planet.

Sorry, Hannity, Obama Has NOT Endangered The US

Sorry, Hannity, Obama Has NOT Endangered The US

We know this will come as something of a disappointment to Sean Hannity, who is just itching for a new war (for other people to fight, of course), maybe even hoping we'll be attacked but it's just not true that President Obama has endangered our country. Media Matters has done a roundup of 100 days of (media) myths and falsehoods about Obama's first 100 days and has some substantial evidence that Hannity's near-nightly accusations that Obama has weakened our standing abroad and that he has endangered the country are false. Don't hold your breath waiting for that information on "fair and balanced" Hannity, unless some Democrat on the "Great American panel" uses it during one of their 30-second soundbites. I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for much more investigation into the report in any other show on "we report, you decide" Fox News, either.

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Porter Goss and The Right Give Lessons In Betraying Our Nation’s Values

The GOP Is Acting Like a Guy Who Got Dumped

The GOP Is Acting Like a Guy Who Got Dumped
By Bill Maher

If conservatives don't want to be seen as bitter people who cling to their guns and religion and anti-immigrant sentiments, they should stop being bitter and clinging to their guns, religion and anti-immigrant sentiments.

It's been a week now, and I still don't know what those "tea bag" protests were about. I saw signs protesting abortion, illegal immigrants, the bank bailout and that gay guy who's going to win "American Idol." But it wasn't tax day that made them crazy; it was election day. Because that's when Republicans became what they fear most: a minority.

The conservative base is absolutely apoplectic because, because ... well, nobody knows. They're mad as hell, and they're not going to take it anymore. Even though they're not quite sure what "it" is. But they know they're fed up with "it," and that "it" has got to stop.

Here are the big issues for normal people: the war, the economy, the environment, mending fences with our enemies and allies, and the rule of law.

And here's the list of Republican obsessions since President Obama took office: that his birth certificate is supposedly fake, he uses a teleprompter too much, he bowed to a Saudi guy, Europeans like him, he gives inappropriate gifts, his wife shamelessly flaunts her upper arms, and he shook hands with Hugo Chavez and slipped him the nuclear launch codes.

Do these sound like the concerns of a healthy, vibrant political party?

It's sad what's happened to the Republicans. They used to be the party of the big tent; now they're the party of the sideshow attraction, a socially awkward group of mostly white people who speak a language only they understand. Like Trekkies, but paranoid.

The GOP base is convinced that Obama is going to raise their taxes, which he just lowered. But, you say, "Bill, that's just the fringe of the Republican Party." No, it's not. The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, is not afraid to say publicly that thinking out loud about Texas seceding from the Union is appropriate considering that ... Obama wants to raise taxes 3% on 5% of the people? I'm not sure exactly what Perry's independent nation would look like, but I'm pretty sure it would be free of taxes and Planned Parenthood. And I would have to totally rethink my position on a border fence.

I know. It's not about what Obama's done. It's what he's planning. But you can't be sick and tired of something someone might do.



Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota recently said she fears that Obama will build "reeducation" camps to indoctrinate young people. But Obama hasn't made any moves toward taking anyone's guns, and with money as tight as it is, the last thing the president wants to do is run a camp where he has to shelter and feed a bunch of fat, angry white people.

Look, I get it, "real America." After an eight-year run of controlling the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court, this latest election has you feeling like a rejected husband. You've come home to find your things out on the front lawn -- or at least more things than you usually keep out on the front lawn. You're not ready to let go, but the country you love is moving on. And now you want to call it a whore and key its car.

That's what you are, the bitter divorced guy whose country has left him -- obsessing over it, haranguing it, blubbering one minute about how much you love it and vowing the next that if you cannot have it, nobody will.

But it's been almost 100 days, and your country is not coming back to you. She's found somebody new. And it's a black guy.

The healthy thing to do is to just get past it and learn to cherish the memories. You'll always have New Orleans and Abu Ghraib.

And if today's conservatives are insulted by this, because they feel they're better than the people who have the microphone in their party, then I say to them what I would say to moderate Muslims: Denounce your radicals. To paraphrase George W. Bush, either you're with them or you're embarrassed by them.

The thing that you people out of power have to remember is that the people in power are not secretly plotting against you. They don't need to. They already beat you in public.

Even Scientists Hired by Industry Agreed on Global Warming

On Climate Issue, Industry Ignored Its Scientists
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
For more than a decade the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing industries with profits tied to fossil fuels, led an aggressive lobbying and public relations campaign against the idea that emissions of heat-trapping gases could lead to global warming.

“The role of greenhouse gases in climate change is not well understood,” the coalition said in a scientific “backgrounder” provided to lawmakers and journalists through the early 1990s, adding that “scientists differ” on the issue.

But a document filed in a federal lawsuit demonstrates that even as the coalition worked to sway opinion, its own scientific and technical experts were advising that the science backing the role of greenhouse gases in global warming could not be refuted.

“The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied,” the experts wrote in an internal report compiled for the coalition in 1995.

The coalition was financed by fees from large corporations and trade groups representing the oil, coal and auto industries, among others. In 1997, the year an international climate agreement that came to be known as the Kyoto Protocol was negotiated, its budget totaled $1.68 million, according to tax records obtained by environmental groups.

Throughout the 1990s, when the coalition conducted a multimillion-dollar advertising campaign challenging the merits of an international agreement, policy makers and pundits were fiercely debating whether humans could dangerously warm the planet. Today, with general agreement on the basics of warming, the debate has largely moved on to the question of how extensively to respond to rising temperatures.

Environmentalists have long maintained that industry knew early on that the scientific evidence supported a human influence on rising temperatures, but that the evidence was ignored for the sake of companies’ fight against curbs on greenhouse gas emissions. Some environmentalists have compared the tactic to that once used by tobacco companies, which for decades insisted that the science linking cigarette smoking to lung cancer was uncertain. By questioning the science on global warming, these environmentalists say, groups like the Global Climate Coalition were able to sow enough doubt to blunt public concern about a consequential issue and delay government action.

George Monbiot, a British environmental activist and writer, said that by promoting doubt, industry had taken advantage of news media norms requiring neutral coverage of issues, just as the tobacco industry once had.

Torture Advocate Judge Jay S. Bybee Should Resign

The shaming of America
Anybody with an active conscience can understand why President Barack Obama ordered the Bush administration's "terror memos" released, overruling his own CIA director. No intelligence secrets were revealed. Much of the information in the documents had previously been widely reported. They weren't classified "Top Secret" to protect national security, but the craven careerists who wrote them, and the White House officials who ordered it done.

To a one-time constitutional-law professor like Obama, the memos' legalistic rationalization of methods indistinguishable from those of the Soviet KGB or South African secret police must have been sickening. Besides shaming themselves and their country, their authors have sullied their profession.

In a 2002 advisory, Jay S. Bybee, subsequently appointed to the U.S. 9th District Court of Appeals by President George W. Bush, notes dryly that the practice of "waterboarding" -- recognized as torture since the Spanish Inquisition -- "constitutes a threat of imminent death," but says it's nevertheless legal because it doesn't cause "prolonged mental harm" in a psychologically healthy subject.

So here's my question: Would Bybee, in his capacity as a federal judge, uphold a murder conviction in which witnesses had been waterboarded? A rape confession? Would it be all right for police to induce confessions by keeping suspects awake for 11 days by shackling them naked in a standing position, dousing them with ice water and smashing their heads into a wall? How about cramming them into coffin-size boxes for weeks? He thought that appropriate for terror suspects.

If not, why not? Are rape and murder not the gravest of crimes? The answer, of course, is that criminal law recognizes that people can be tortured into confessing damn near anything. The "intelligence" implications, however, were lost on Bybee and the Bush White House.

FBI interviewers who obtained the only useful intelligence ever provided by al-Qaida functionary Abu Zubaydah before CIA toughs got hold of him described the man to author Ron Suskind as psychologically fragile. Suskind's CIA sources found Zubaydah an "insane, certifiable, split personality," whom the agency nevertheless waterboarded 83 times.

Zealots in Washington, see, refused to accept his handlers' insistence that Zubaydah had already told them everything he'd known.

Ironically, Bybee's successor, Steven Bradbury, noted in a 2005 memo that the U.S. State Department regularly "condemns coercive interrogation techniques ... employed by other countries." Also, that "certain of the techniques appear to bear some resemblance to some of the CIA techniques." Others appear to have been borrowed directly from George Orwell's novel "1984."

Harsh Interrogation Tactics Used To Force Detainees Into Inventing Iraq-al Qaida Link

Harsh Interrogation Tactics Used To Force Detainees Into Inventing Iraq-al Qaida Link
A report released Tuesday by the Senate Armed Services Committee presented new details regarding Bush administration officials' approval of the military's use of harsh interrogation techniques on terrorism suspects. The 232-page, newly declassified report was approved by the Armed Services Committee on November 20, 2008, and had since then been under review at the Department of Defense for declassification.

Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee, wrote about the significance of the report on HuffPost:

In my judgment, the report represents a condemnation of both the Bush administration's interrogation policies and of senior administration officials who attempted to shift the blame for abuse - such as that seen at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan - to low ranking soldiers. Claims, such as that made by former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz that detainee abuses could be chalked up to the unauthorized acts of a "few bad apples," were simply false.


The report revealed new information about the origins of the military's interrogation techniques. As the Washington Post writes:

[The report] sheds new light on the adaptation of techniques from a U.S. military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), used to train American service personnel to resist interrogations if captured by an enemy that does not honor the Geneva Conventions' ban on torture.


The military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) has been reported to have reverse-engineered these methods to break al-Qaeda prisoners. The techniques, including waterboarding, or simulated drowning, were drawn from the methods used by Chinese Communists to coerce confessions from U.S. soldiers during the Korean War -- a lineage that one instructor appeared to readily acknowledge.

"We can provide the ability to exploit personnel based on how our enemies have done this type of thing over the last five decades," Joseph Witsch wrote in a July 2002 memo.

What is perhaps more alarming is that few, if any, of the top officials involved in allowing the use of these interrogations methods knew anything about their 'gruesome origins' nor bothered to actually investigate what it was they were approving, according to the New York Times:

According to several former top officials involved in the discussions seven years ago, they did not know that the military training program, called SERE, for Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, had been created decades earlier to give American pilots and soldiers a sample of the torture methods used by Communists in the Korean War, methods that had wrung false confessions from Americans.


Even George J. Tenet, the C.I.A. director who insisted that the agency had thoroughly researched its proposal and pressed it on other officials, did not examine the history of the most shocking method, the near-drowning technique known as waterboarding.

Establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq was one of the factors motivating the use of these interrogation methods. From McClatchy:

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

Former Bush Torture Memo Lawyer May Get Impeachment Inquiry

Former Bush Torture Memo Lawyer May Get Impeachment Inquiry
Tonight on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow interviewed Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a member of the Judiciary Committee, about his views on whether Jay Bybee should be impeached:

MADDOW: Do you think that it is possible that an impeachment inquiry is warranted in this case, if only because the circumstances that are known about Judge Bybee's career are now so different than when the Senate voted on
him in 2003?

WHITEHOUSE: It is certainly possible that an impeachment inquiry is warranted. But I think that decision should probably wait until the Department of Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility finishes its investigation into the Office of Legal Counsel and all of these opinions.

Whitehouse said the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility is expected to release the results of its year-long investigation in the very near future. Watch it: video at link.

The Wall Street Journal notes that Bybee's "got a nationally recognized lawyer on his side, Latham & Watkins’s Maureen Mahoney, who’s handling the case pro bono."

Overlords of US Torture Must Be Punished

Overlords of US Torture Must Be Punished
The US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Jay S Bybee presides with apparent comfortable authority over his high jurisdiction. The Ninth Circuit is the largest. The great cases of the West Coast states are argued out before him. His record as a lawyer is notable. He has to his name a distinguished volume on the Eighth Amendment: we can assume that seared in his mind are its words: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people".

Given numerical, historical and rhetorical proximity of the Ninth to the Eighth Amendment - "Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted" - one can be reasonably sure that this leading US judicial authority is an assiduous enforcer of the rights of the individual against the federal government; that he will ensure that torture or other inhuman or degrading treatment is not meted out against persons in custody; and that the government is brought to account whenever those great constitutional rights are under attack.

Or is there a huge "maybe" against Judge Bybee? If so, does it have transatlantic implications in the heart of Britain? In an extraordinary event of the past week, President Barack Obama, himself a distinguished American jurist, with a profound understanding of what he may now regard as his own Constitution, has exposed Bybee's complicity in a terrifying case of double standards.

It took real Presidential courage, and public disclosure of a kind almost unimaginable in the traditionally cautious thinking of British governments of all colours, to release to documents detailing decisions about the unusual treatment of al-Qa'ida suspects. It is likely to lead to a change of heart by the US government about the disclosure to our own courts of documents concerning cases like that of Binyam Mohamed. The newly released documents are now available online. Included is one dated 1 August 2002. It is long and detailed. Eighteen full pages closely typed and single-spaced. It is signed in the manuscript of Jay S Bybee, as the holder of the powerful and influential position of US Assistant Attorney General. It is addressed to another lawyer, John Rizzo, of the CIA.

One can almost imagine the fictional agent Jack Bauer, waterboard in hand, palpitating Abu Zubaydah before him, as he read it. The opinion discusses 10 techniques of "certain proposed conduct". The list is chilling: (1) attention grasp, (2) walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap (insult slap), (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress positions, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) insects placed with the subject in a confinement box, and (10) the waterboard. All are sanitised descriptions of something very unpleasant indeed.

Bybee's conclusion is that the use of those techniques, either separately or in combination, would not violate US law, because, as he put it, "no evidence exists that this course of conduct produces any prolonged mental harm". Had Mr (as he then was) Bybee made that submission in the Queen's Bench Division in London, he would have been given the shortest shrift, as befits the intellectually indefensible.

President Obama has been criticised by some, including the respected American Civil Liberties Union, for discouraging prosecution of US agents who followed Bybee's now notorious opinion. Put crudely, those who may have administered what we would regard as torture will get away with it. They were merely obeying orders, so may be excused.

This is not only an unattractive proposition but one with which I do not agree, at least when considering those who may have been involved at a senior level. The revelations made on Presidential orders seem to me a refreshing change of approach, telling the world that the slate is being cleaned of executive acts of a kind that will not appear again.

The much derided notion of ethics in the governmental process rears its head from time to time, usually to be dashed by scandal or convenience. Pragmatic incrementalism is all too easy, the disease afflicting all governments when they feel compelled by the exigencies of the day to compromise on principle. President Obama has made a balanced choice, weighing proportionality in favour of confessing America's wrongs to the world as a promise, given in earnest, of better things to come, but letting off the hook those who were the instrumentalists of the unacceptable.

However, that is not the end of the matter. What about the conductors - the Jay S Bybees and others who may have been the conductors of the discordant and wailing orchestra of inhuman and degrading interrogation? And what if there were any orchestrators from Britain or other allied countries? The Attorney General, Baroness Scotland, announced the beginning of a police inquiry into the Binyam Mohamed case and possibly others. What, if anything, results will depend on evidence and, even if there is evidence, formidable considerations of public interest will arise.

Perhaps President Obama has set an acceptable starting standard - of opening the issue to judgment in the court of public opinion, with a view to a future in which we accept that civilised behaviour is worth a thousand forced confessions.

Republicans, the disappearing party

The Republican Point of No Return
There was a point not long after the 2006 midterm elections when observers began to note that Republicans were in truly terrible shape, that a staggering number of Senate and House Republicans were acutely vulnerable in their re-elections, and that in all likelihood, if the GOP failed to reconnect with voters, they would suffer even more substantial losses in 2008.

Republicans are in even weaker shape now. The party is contracting in size as it self-marginalizes; the number of voters who identify themselves as Republican is at its lowest point in decades, and nearly every poll shows a dramatic divergence of opinion between self-identifying Republicans and self-identifying Independents. The fight for the "middle voter" has been fought and won by the Democrats, who are consistently viewed as more capable on substantive policy issues than Republicans. A recent Gallup poll showed that 71 percent of voters trust Obama on the economy. That number is built on a strong coalition of Democratic and Independent voters. 97 percent of Democrats and 68 percent of Independents expressed confidence in Obama's handling of the economy, compared to only 38 percent of Republicans. On an issue as critically important to voters as the economy, a 30 point divide in viewpoints between Republicans and Independents spells serious trouble going forward.

If the GOP has any hope of being competitive in the 2010 midterms, it had better figure out a way to appeal to Independents again. But if Republicans had any intention of reconnecting with those voters, this week's headlines don't give any indication.

During the much-panned Republican "tea party" protests, aimed at high taxes (and also wasteful spending and also socialism and also Obama's secret Muslim roots and also his fake birth certificate and also a few other things one might write on a poster board), Texas Governor Rick Perry threatened to secede. Tom Delay defended him - and secession. So did Rush Limbaugh. Republicans touted the protests as an impressive showing of conservative online organizing. But their success in numbers belies a serious problem.

Republicans are right to recognize how critical their capacity to organize will be toward their future electoral success. But as the Republican base gets smaller, and more ideological, organizing the base may very well mean alienating a critical group of voters - just about everyone else. Still Republican politicians are no less dependent on their base for money and volunteers, which may explain the recent propensity of national Republicans to read conspiracy-driven paranoia into the Congressional Record. The complication, of course, is that Republicans who are unable to depend on the GOP base will never build an organization capable of winning elections. But those who do depend on that base will be constrained by a policy agenda well outside the mainstream.

Conservative Extremists Inadvertently Admit They Are Guilty of Behavior in DHS Report

Conservative Extremists Inadvertently Admit They Are Guilty of Behavior in DHS Report
Since the Department of Homeland Security declassified an April 7 report detailing potential increases in right-wing extremism, media figures -- including CNN's Lou Dobbs, conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh, Fox News' Sean Hannity, Fox News national political commentator Andrea Tantaros, and Fox News contributor Michelle Malkin -- have advanced the claim that the Obama administration is targeting conservatives and others simply because they disagree with administration policies and proposals. For example, during the April 14 edition of his nationally syndicated radio show, Limbaugh claimed: "[Y]ou have a report from Janet Napolitano and Barack Obama Department of Homeland Security portraying standard, ordinary, everyday conservatives as posing a bigger threat to this country than Al Qaeda terrorists or genuine enemies of this country like Kim Jong-Il." However, while the report addressed potential issues that could spur right-wing extremism, it did not allege that someone is an extremist simply because he or she holds conservative views.

The DHS report concluded that "rightwing extremists may be gaining new recruits by playing on their fears about several emergent issues. The economic downturn and the election of the first African American president present unique drivers for rightwing radicalization and recruitment." The report also cited as potential mobilizing issues for right-wing extremism "immigration and citizenship, the expansion of social programs to minorities, and restrictions on firearms ownership and use," as well as "[r]ightwing extremist paranoia ... harkening back to the 'New World Order' conspiracy theories of the 1990s."

Fox's Tea Party Movement Supports Off Shore Tax Fraud

Republican "Tea Baggers" take note
One wonders if Phil Gramm has been made just a tad nervous by the news on Tuesday that one of UBS's super-wealthy private clients has pleaded guilty to tax evasion. That's the second case in two weeks involving the bank at which the former senator is a vice chairman, and 100 other clients are under investigation for possible bank-assisted tax fraud.

Gramm, the Republican former chair of the Senate Finance Committee, where he authored much of the deregulatory legislation at the heart of the current banking meltdown, has for the six years since he left office helped lead a foreign-owned bank specializing in tax dodges for the wealthy. These schemes by the Swiss-based UBS not only force the rest of us taxpayers to pay more to make up the government revenue shortfall but are blatantly illegal. In February, UBS admitted to having committed fraud and conspiracy and agreed to pay a fine of $780 million. Republican "Tea Baggers" take note: Offshore tax havens do not equal populist revolt.

In the UBS "deferred prosecution agreement" with the Justice Department, the bank agreed to turn over the names of its secret account holders to avoid a criminal indictment. The complicity of top executives in this far-ranging scheme to use foreign tax havens to cheat the US treasury of billions in uncollected taxes was noted at the time in a Justice Department statement: "Swiss bankers routinely traveled to the United States to market Swiss bank secrecy to United States clients interested in attempting to evade United States income taxes."

What did Gramm think all of those Swiss bankers from his firm were doing over here? Was he totally clueless? The Justice Department statement suggests otherwise: "UBS executives knew that UBS's cross-border business violated the law. They refused to stop this activity, however, and in fact instructed their bankers to grow the business. The reason was money--the business was too profitable to give up. This was not a mere compliance oversight, but rather a knowing crime motivated by greed and disrespect of the law."

Republicans Choke On Excessive Government Surveillance They Supported

The ultimate reaping of what one sows: right-wing edition
Right-wing polemicists today are shrieking in self-pitying protest over a new report from the Department of Homeland Security sent to local police forces which warns of growing "right-wing extremist activity." The report (.pdf) identifies attributes of these right-wing extremists, warning that a growing domestic threat of violence and terrorism "may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration" and "groups that reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority."

Conservatives have responded to this disclosure as though they're on the train to FEMA camps. The Right's leading political philosopher and intellectual historian, Jonah Goldberg, invokes fellow right-wing giant Ronald Reagan and says: "Here we go Again," protesting that "this seems so nakedly ideological." Michelle Malkin, who spent the last eight years cheering on every domestic surveillance and police state program she could find, announces that it's "Confirmed: The Obama DHS hit job on conservatives is real!" Lead-War-on-Terror-cheerleader Glenn Reynolds warns that DHS -- as a result of this report (but not, apparently, anything that happened over the last eight years) -- now considers the Constitution to be a "subversive manifesto." Super Tough Guy Civilization-Warrior Mark Steyn has already concocted an elaborate, detailed martyr fantasy in which his house is surrounded by Obama-dispatched, bomb-wielding federal agents. Malkin's Hot Air stomps its feet about all "the smears listed in the new DHS warning about 'right-wing extremism.'"

It's certainly true that federal police efforts directed at domestic political movements -- even ones with a history of inspiring violence in both the distant and recent past -- require real vigilance and oversight, and it's also true that the DHS description of these groups seems excessively broad with the potential for mischief. But the political faction screeching about the dangers of the DHS is the same one that spent the last eight years vastly expanding the domestic Surveillance State and federal police powers in every area. DHS -- and the still-creepy phrase "homeland security" -- became George Bush's calling card. The Republicans won the 2002 election by demonizing those who opposed its creation. All of the enabling legislation underlying this Surveillance State -- from the Patriot Act to the Military Commissions Act, from the various FISA "reforms" to massive increases in domestic "counter-Terrorism" programs -- are the spawns of the very right-wing movement that today is petrified that this is all being directed at them.

When you cheer on a Surveillance State, you have no grounds to complain when it turns its eyes on you. If you create a massive and wildly empowered domestic surveillance apparatus, it's going to monitor and investigate domestic political activity. That's its nature. I'd love to know how many of the participants in today's right-wing self-victim orgy uttered a peep of protest about any of this, from 2005:

F.B.I. Watched Activist Groups, New Files Show

WASHINGTON, Dec. 19 - Counterterrorism agents at the Federal Bureau of Investigation have conducted numerous surveillance and intelligence-gathering operations that involved, at least indirectly, groups active in causes as diverse as the environment, animal cruelty and poverty relief, newly disclosed agency records show.

After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, John Ashcroft, who was then attorney general, loosened restrictions on the F.B.I.'s investigative powers, giving the bureau greater ability to visit and monitor Web sites, mosques and other public entities in developing terrorism leads. The bureau has used that authority to investigate not only groups with suspected ties to foreign terrorists, but also protest groups suspected of having links to violent or disruptive activities.

But the documents, coming after the Bush administration's confirmation that President Bush had authorized some spying without warrants in fighting terrorism, prompted charges from civil rights advocates that the government had improperly blurred the line between terrorism and acts of civil disobedience and lawful protest.

One F.B.I. document indicates that agents in Indianapolis planned to conduct surveillance as part of a "Vegan Community Project." Another document talks of the Catholic Workers group's "semi-communistic ideology." A third indicates the bureau's interest in determining the location of a protest over llama fur planned by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.

The documents, provided to The New York Times over the past week, came as part of a series of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union. For more than a year, the A.C.L.U. has been seeking access to information in F.B.I. files on about 150 protest and social groups that it says may have been improperly monitored.

The F.B.I. had previously turned over a small number of documents on antiwar groups, showing the agency's interest in investigating possible anarchist or violent links in connection with antiwar protests and demonstrations in advance of the 2004 political conventions. And earlier this month, the A.C.L.U.'s Colorado chapter released similar documents involving, among other things, people protesting logging practices at a lumber industry gathering in 2002.

The latest batch of documents, parts of which the A.C.L.U. plans to release publicly on Tuesday, totals more than 2,300 pages and centers on references in internal files to a handful of groups, including PETA, the environmental group Greenpeace and the Catholic Workers group, which promotes antipoverty efforts and social causes.

"It's clear that this administration has engaged every possible agency, from the Pentagon to N.S.A. to the F.B.I., to engage in spying on Americans," said Ann Beeson, associate legal director for the A.C.L.U.

"You look at these documents," Ms. Beeson said, "and you think, wow, we have really returned to the days of J. Edgar Hoover, when you see in F.B.I. files that they're talking about a group like the Catholic Workers league as having a communist ideology."

I was in Minneapolis and St. Paul during the 2008 GOP Convention and witnessed first-hand massive federal police raids and "preventive" arrests of peaceful, law-abiding protesters and even the violent arrests of journalists, and I don't recall any complaints from Jonah Goldberg or Michelle Malkin. I don't recall Glenn Reynolds or Mark Steyn complaining that the FBI, for virtually the entire Bush administration, was systematically abusing its new National Security Letters authorities under the Patriot Act to collect extremely invasive information, in secret, about Americans who had done nothing wrong. Russ Feingold's efforts to place limits and abuse-preventing safeguards on these Patriot Act powers in 2006 attracted a grand total of 10 votes in the Senate -- none Republican.

Obama Derangement Syndrome epidemic on conservative airwaves

Obama Derangement Syndrome epidemic on conservative airwaves

In recent months, the violent, doomsday, and anti-intellectual rhetoric that has long been a staple of conservative media has taken a notable turn in at least three significant ways: previously confined to the right-wing media fringe, the rhetoric is now a constant across the full spectrum of conservative media; it is louder and meaner, with conservative media figures appealing overtly to feelings of anger and paranoia in their audience; and it is focused, tied to the specific political aim of undermining the Obama administration and the Congress.

None other than David Horowitz notes "an interesting phenomenon on the Right, which is beginning to cause me concern": "the over-top-hysteria in response to the first months in office of our new president." Horowitz calls this "hysteria" "Obama Derangement Syndrome."

Indeed, the rise of anti-government speech -- and the explosion of anti-Obama rhetoric -- on right-wing radio, Fox News, and among conservatives in other media outlets tracks directly with the arrival of the new administration and its broad efforts to address the myriad and interlocking problems confronting the country. Rather than engaging in substantive policy analysis and critique, the Glenn Becks, Sean Hannitys, and Rush Limbaughs of radio and television insult their audience with simplistic attacks on Obama and his administration's initiatives.

Far from informing the public, Beck, Hannity, Limbaugh, and numerous others on Fox News and elsewhere launch attacks at Obama, progressives, and their policy proposals with accusations of any one or more "isms" that bear no relationship to reality or even to each other. They warn darkly of purported efforts by the Obama administration to cede U.S. sovereignty to a world order rather than engaging in meaningful discussions about the United States' role and image in the world. They scapegoat vulnerable groups, encouraging the perception that undocumented immigrants, the poor, and racial and ethnic minorities are to blame for economic problems in this country. During a time of numerous high-profile acts of gun violence, they claim with alarm that Obama intends to seize their guns. Fox News has adopted the Tax Day "tea parties" as its own, urging its audience to organize and attend what it characterizes as protests of Obama administration tax and economic policies; the network's promotions of these tea-party protests have been largely devoid of meaningful and truthful discussion of the actual merits and flaws in the administration's proposals for reform -- and of little substantive attention to the question of whether Fox News' audience would be better or worse off under those proposals the network is encouraging its audience to protest.

On his show, Beck has gone so far as to purport to imitate Obama pouring gasoline on the American public to light it on fire.

The demagoguery in the conservative media could have real consequences for the country and for efforts by law and policymakers to address serious problems. It is a disservice to the conservative media's audience and to the country, involving distortions of issues with falsehoods and with rhetoric and imagery that incite anger rather than encouraging citizens to engage meaningfully in political and legislative debate and process.

Republicans Obsessed with ACORN Conspiracy Theories

Republicans Obsessed with ACORN Conspiracy Theories
Michael Steele is still the chairman of the Republican National Committee.

He's just being picking fights with people who don't have microphones.

Instead of stirring it up with the real boss of the Grand Old Party, Rush Limbaugh, or with Arlen Specter and the handful of congressional Republicans who might actually want to extend their party's platform beyond the word "no," Steele has returned to the obsessive focus that made him a favorite of the party's neanderthal wing: picking on poor people, working families and the organizations that advocate for people who do not have closets full of pinstripe suits.

To be more precise, Steele is attacking ACORN, charging that the group Republicans attacked with such determination during their failed 2008 campaign is now part of a scheme to "falsify the U.S. Census and manipulate elections in their favor."

"Our democracy, and the principle of 'One Person, One Vote' are in jeopardy," rants Steele in -- you guessed it -- a fund-raising appeal.

Steele's latest claim goes like this:

It seems the Obama Administration has plans to rig the Census results.

President Obama's old friends from ACORN, the leftist, urban "community" organization with a long history of promoting vote fraud, has been chosen by the Administration as a "partner" with the Census Bureau to determine population counts in cities around the country.

With this group's track record of coming up with countless fraudulent voter registrations in heavily Democrat areas to sway elections to ultra-liberals, you can be sure they'll be manipulating population numbers as well.

And after receiving millions in political payback from the Democrats' recently passed "Stimulus" Bill, ACORN's community organizers are eager to once again take action to aid their old friend in the White House.

Why is this important? The U.S. population has shifted in the last ten years. States like Illinois, Michigan, New York and Pennsylvania (all states Obama won in 2008) have smaller populations, and states like Arizona, Georgia and South Carolina (all states that John McCain carried) have gained population.

The trend illustrates that urban strongholds, which favor Democrats, continue to lose population to more decentralized areas in states more likely to lean Republican.

If the Democrats and their friends at ACORN have their way, the Census will only "estimate" state populations and therefore be subject to political calculations. And surely their estimate will be far higher than the actual number of people, and voters, present.

We must not let the Democrats and their radical leftist allies falsify the U.S. Census and manipulate elections in their favor. Our democracy, and the principle of "One Person, One Vote" are in jeopardy.

Please help the Republican Party's effort to spread the word about the Obama Democrats' misuse of power and plans to end free and fair elections. Support our effort to get the word out about this threat and ensure an accurate, non-partisan Census by making a contribution of $1,000, $500, $100, $50 or $25 to the Republican National Committee today.

Your gift will also help support the recruitment and election of principled candidates who will defeat the Democrats in 2010 and pave the way to send Barack Obama packing in 2012.

Yikes!

Sounds scary.

And that's the point.

For all his talk about diversity and reaching out to communities that have not always been attracted by the Grand Old Party's anti-immigrant, anti-worker, anti-community messaging, Steele knows that the party's donors get excited by, er, well, the Grand Old Party's anti-immigrant, anti-worker, anti-community messaging.

Steele's ACORN obsession is particularly frustrating -- and dishonest -- because it targets one of the few groups in America that has stood consistently on the right side of fights over the census, voter turnout and empowering the poor and working families.

But ACORN/ knows how to fight back.

"Republican Party Chair Michael Steele has finally lost all touch with reality," says ACORN CEO and chief organizer Bertha Lewis. "(He has) sent a message to Republican Party members accusing President Obama and ACORN of scheming to 'falsify the U.S. Census and manipulate elections". He even ridiculously claimed that "Our democracy, and the principle of 'One Person, One Vote' are in jeopardy.'

"Clearly, ACORN's work to help millions of low and middle-income Americans who otherwise wouldn't participate in our electoral process register to vote has Michael Steele scared. And now, he's afraid that the 2010 census will accurately count the entire US population -- including traditionally undercounted minorities and low-income Americans."

Lewis is dealing in hard facts, rather than the fantasies that are Steele's favored political currency. So she confidency declares: "ACORN is not getting billions from the federal government -- and Michael Steele knows it. We are not in charge of the Census -- and Michael Steele knows it. Just like the accusations of the past six months, these ridiculous charges are imaginary and false -- and Michael Steele knows it."

But Lewis is taking things a step further.

She is challenging Steele to meet with her at the home of a family that ACORN has helped fight foreclosure.

Lewis wants Steele to see and hear from "the real ACORN."

And she's betting -- or at least hoping -- that if she Steele and his amen corner in the media was confronted with the reality of ACORN's good works, the RNC chair would back off.

Lewis may be a little more optimistic about the notion that the truth shall set you free.

Steele has a remarkable record of resisting reality. And the media has shown a marked penchant for joining the failed Maryland Senate candidate and his GOP allies in scapegoating ACORN as an alternative to examining real issues related to low-income communities -- a journalistic malpractice detailed in new report from Media Matters illustrates.

But Bertha Lewis and ACORN earn high marks for pushing back at the failed party "leader" who is pushing them around to try and stir up his reactionary base.

Fox News Teabagging Coverage Cited By Rachel Maddow

Fox News Teabagging Coverage Cited By Rachel Maddow
Teabagging is sweeping the nation. Rachel Maddow did a report on this new, conservative, right wing phenomenon on her show, last night, in a segment that began with the chyron “InsaniTea”. She summarized the high points of Fox News’s plethora of coverage including Neil Cavuto saying "we're all over it" (eww) and Griff Jenkins (sporting colonial hat) reading the movement's admonition to “teabag the White House.” (Lots of cajones needed for a building that size; but today's conservatives are muy macho!) Maddow’s coverage was quite informative. While she said that the movement’s organizers can’t be held responsible for who shows up, there is a great deal of interest in the white supremacist and militia community. (Fans of Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, or leftist “plants?”) She said that Republican Senator David (diaper) Vitter wants a law honoring April 15th as a national tea party day. But I thought that Ana Marie Cox’s comment was just so right – “who wouldn’t want to teabag John McCain?”

Video at link

Dick Morris Lies About Barney Frank and Fannie Mae

Dick Morris Lies About Barney Frank and Fannie Mae
Dick Morris falsely claimed that "in the 2000s, when Bush proposed measures to rein in Fannie Mae, Barney Frank killed them." In fact, for much of the 2000s, Frank had no power to "kill[] ... measures" -- Republicans controlled the House, and Frank sponsored a bill to enhance oversight of Fannie and Freddie soon after Democrats took over the House in 2007.

Media falsely claim Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) did not answer question asking if he bore any responsibility for financial crisis

Media falsely claim Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) did not answer question asking if he bore any responsibility for financial crisis
Several media figures falsely claimed Barney Frank did not answer a student's question asking how much responsibility he bore for the financial crisis. In fact, Frank did provide a substantive response to the question.

During the April 8 edition of MSNBC's Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough falsely claimed, repeatedly, that Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) would not give an answer to a student's question: "[H]ow much, if any, responsibility do you think you have" for the financial crisis? Similarly, on the April 8 edition of Fox News' Fox & Friends, co-host Steve Doocy falsely claimed Frank "never answered" the student's question, and on the April 7 edition of his Fox News television program, Sean Hannity asserted that Frank "had a little trouble answering a very simple question last night." Contrary to their claims, Frank did provide a substantive response, which none of them mentioned or aired.

Scarborough, Doocy, and Hannity all played clips of the exchange between Frank and a student at an event at the Harvard University Kennedy School of Government. But none of them noted that Frank said, "The answer is, yes, I do take responsibility for something," or that he later added that after filing "a bill in 2006 when I was still in the minority to say that hedge funds should be registered," in 2007, he "was approached by people who said, 'No. No. You can't do too much regulation,' and I backed off. I wish I hadn't." Frank also noted that he did, in fact, work on legislation to deal with mortgage lending, stating that in 2007 his committee passed restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and on subprime lending.

How Senator Chris Dodd Can Save Himself and Help America

Chris Dodd: Scourge or Casualty of Wall Street?
Democratic Senator Chris Dodd is in deep trouble. According to Stuart Rothenberg, Dodd is the most vulnerable Senator up for re-election in 2010 - despite the fact that he's coasted to election easily in this deep blue state since his first Senate run in 1980.

A March Quinnipiac University poll of registered voters showed only 33% of voters approve of the job Dodd is doing, while 58% disapprove. He trailed his likely Republican opponent, Rob Simmons by double digits.

Dodd's reputation has been sullied in the financial collapse. Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, he received special treatment from lender Countrywide Financial (and was designated as a "friend of Angelo"). Countrywide, founded by Angelo Mozilo, was a leading peddler of the toxic loans that poisoned the financial system - particularly the subprime "Ninja loans" - mortgages to applicants with no income, no job and no hope.

As Chair, Dodd also was thrown under the bus by Treasury officials in the AIG bonus brouhaha, finally admitting that he had stripped the provision that would have limited the bonuses of AIG execs from the stimulus bill. Worse, Dodd's wife turned out to be on the board of directors of IPC Holdings, a Bermuda based insurance company controlled by AIG.

Very deep trouble.

So, why not turn the lemons into lemonade? As Chair of the Senate Banking Committee, Dodd could make himself into the source of the solution, not part of the problem. We need a Pecora Commission - a grand inquest into the roots of the financial crisis, modeled after the investigation led by Ferdinand Pecora in the 1930s. But the Pecora wasn't running an independent commission. He was Chief Counsel for the investigation of the Senate Banking Committee.

Dodd would render the country - and possibly his own political fortunes - remarkable service if he decided to lead a similar investigation into the current collapse. Subpoena the records of Countrywide and others and expose the systematic fraud and malpractice that went on. Call in the heads of Citibank and Goldman Sachs and Bank of America and detail how they abandoned all prudence in pursuit of millions in private profits. Lay out for Americans the conflicts of interest that led the rating companies to go with the flow, the ideological blinders that allowed the regulators and Federal Reserve to overlook the gambling going on in the casino. Expose the banking lobbies and deregulation that spawned the shadow banking system.

Serious hearings on the roots of the collapse are essential if we are to achieve fundamental reform and restructuring of finance. Explosive hearings could warn the Obama administration off its unworkable plans to enlist hedge funds in the effort to prop up the zombie banks.

By making himself the scourge of Wall Street rather than its servitor, by championing reform in public rather than dealing in Senate cloakrooms, Senator Dodd would not only create a proud legacy, he might also be revive his own political fortunes. Chris Dodd, driving the change that we need. Sounds like a plan.

Will New Food Safety Bills Really Outlaw Backyard Gardening

Will New Food Safety Bills Really Outlaw Backyard Gardening By Ari LeVaux,
My inbox has been pummeled in recent weeks by a barrage of emails warning me of the evils of HR 875, a bill currently working its way through Congress. Sponsored by Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn), the Food Safety Modernization Act of 2009 was one of several bills introduced in the wake of the peanut butter-borne salmonella outbreak. Each of these bills ostensibly seeks to improve food safety with increased regulation.

Critics, paranoid and level-headed alike, point to the disproportionate burden that increased regulation places on small farmers, and many wonder if the banner of food safety is being used as a Trojan horse to create a more favorable business climate for corporate agriculture.

"If [HR 875] passes, say goodbye to organic produce, your Local Farmer's market and very possibly, the GARDEN IN YOUR OWN BACKYARD!!!!!" announced one email."

Another warned that HR 875 would result in "...criminalization of seed banking, prison terms and confiscatory fines for farmers."

And of course, no serious foodie conspiracy theory would be complete without Monsanto as the architect: "DeLauro's husband Stanley Greenburg works for Monsanto!" claim nearly all of these emails.

Stanley Greenberg is indeed the CEO of a polling firm that did, indeed, contract with Monsanto. But it's no more true to say he works for Monsanto than it is to say he works for Nelson Mandela - who was also a former client of his firm, according to factcheck.org, which did a detailed dissection of one of the viral emails.

These emails seem to have been propagated largely by well-intentioned foodies, after having originated from a cadre of conspiracy theorists and Ron Paul supporters with too much time on their hands.

"There is a perfectly legitimate conversation to be had about how we can have food safety regulation without jeopardizing small farms and local food systems," says Patty Lovera, Assistant director of Food and Water Watch. "But it's hard to have a rational conversation via forwarded emails. It's not happening in a way that's going to change the policy."

Lovera says HR 875 won't regulate seed-saving, backyard gardens, or farmers markets. It would, however, split the Food and Drug Administration into separate bodies, one for food and one for drugs. This is a move that Food and Water Watch would support. But unfortunately, she says, it's likely to kill the bill, because splitting the FDA might be too daunting a task for lawmakers to take on right now.

Another bill that's more likely to make it to a vote, Lovera says, is HR 759. While this bill, "the Food And Drug Administration Globalization Act," has drawn relatively little attention, she thinks it would be more likely to cause big problems for small farmers.

HR 759 would extend traceability recordkeeping requirements that currently apply only to food processors to farms and restaurants - and require that recordkeeping be done electronically, placing a disproportionate burden, in terms of time and money, on small farmers. The bill would also establish production standards for fruits and vegetables, which are called "Good Agricultural Practices."

Agriculture practices designed to improve food safety and address environmental, economic, and social sustainability, might sound like a good idea, Lovera says. But as written, the Good Agriculture Practices are mostly relevant to large, corporate farms - which are the source of most farm-related economic, social, environmental, and safety problems to begin with.

All of these bills, ostensibly, are efforts to make factory-farmed food safer so we can avoid E.coli in spinach, downer cattle in school lunches, feathers in chicken patties, and other food-borne horror stories we've grown all-too used to hearing about. But if these regulations are extended to the small, family farms where the problems aren't coming from, it's more than just a legislative overextension. It's a tilting of the playing field grossly in favor of corporate agriculture. And on this point, we all should be paranoid.

"What people don't realize is that if any of these bills pass, we lose. All we will have left is industrial food," says Deborah Stockton, executive director of the National Independent Consumers and Farmers Association, which is dedicated to promoting and preserving unregulated direct farmer-to-consumer trade, and fostering the availability of locally grown or home-produced food products.

One of Stockton's top priorities is stopping the controversial National Animal Identification System (NAIS). Implemented by USDA in 2003 without congressional approval, NAIS is a federal registry program for livestock and for the premises where animals live or visit. The stated purpose of the system is to aid state and federal government response to outbreaks of animal disease.

"NAIS is a safety net for the corporate livestock industry," Stockton told me. "They're the ones with the practices that are creating problems for human and animal health, and they're the ones who need NAIS to cover their backs when something goes wrong. The main threats to food safety are centralized production, processing and long distance transportation."

Food and Water Watch shares Stockton's distaste for NAIS. According ot its web page: "The current plan to create a federal animal identification system ignores existing state animal health programs, puts too much emphasis on privatizing the data collection (forcing small farmers to submit data about their operations to trade associations they don't support), and essentially forces small farmers and ranchers to pay for a safety net for agribusiness."

But, says Lovera, the bills currently under consideration are aimed at the FDA, and NAIS is a USDA program. While she sees a lot of problems with many of the current bills, strengthening NAIS isn't one of them.

Stockton doesn't buy it. If any of them pass, she says, it would ratify NAIS, and strengthen USDA's ability to make it mandatory for all livestock, including your flock of backyard chickens.

So lawmakers, if you're listening, and you want these protestors, ballistic and level-headed alike, to chill out, here is how to get them off your backs: exempt local food systems from the current bills. Include specific language in the bills that will guarantee that small family farms, backyard gardens, personal livestock, farmers markets, and all forms of food self-sufficiency and farmer-direct purchasing are protected. Because the right to buy milk from your neighbor or grow your own food is as inalienable as the right to bear arms. And if you threaten to take away this right, you're going to face a backlash that will make the NRA seem like a bunch of flower-waving Hare Krishnas.

reprinted for educational purposes.

Witches, Condoms and the Pope

Witches, Condoms and the Pope by Christopher Brauchli
Get in line in that processional,
Step into that small confessional,
There, the guy who’s got religion’ll
Tell you if your sin’s original. . . .
— Tom Lehrer, The Vatican Rag

He’s batting 50-50 which isn’t bad for most people. If you’re infallible, however, it’s not the sort of thing you’d brag about the next time you talk to your Father. The witches kept him from batting a zero.

While traveling through Africa recently Pope Benedict XVI came out firmly against witchcraft. Addressing the multitude of Catholics that were lining the Angolan streets on March 21, the Pope told his audience that if they had friends or neighbors who believed in witchcraft they should try to convert them. At a mass in Luanda at which two people who had already been saved were trampled to death in the mob’s eagerness to hear what the man from Rome had to say, the Pope said: “In today’s Angola Catholics should offer the message of Christ to the many who live in the fear of spirits, of evil powers by whom they feel threatened.” The Pope imparted the same message to a group of clergymen and nuns earlier in the day when he said they should be missionaries to the Angolans who live in fear “of spirits, of malign and threatening powers. In their bewilderment they end up even condemning street children and the elderly as alleged sorcerers.” (It sounded remarkably like a description of the effects religion had on the early settlers in the United States.) It was not a particularly courageous stand for him to take since witchcraft has pretty much fallen out of favor in most parts of the world and a suggestion from him that it should be abandoned is not a suggestion that bespeaks great moral courage. Nonetheless, not everything that boosts your average is a great feat and so it was with the attack on witchcraft. It simply raised the Pope’s average to 50-50. It was his observations at the beginning of the trip that kept him from hitting 100% with his attack on witchcraft.

Joining the enlightened crowd that sits on the Texas Board of Education and would like to include in the Texas curriculum the fact (as they see it) that evolution is nothing more than a theory and there are other theories to be explored to explain the world) the Pope’s first pronouncements on his trip to Africa was that the use of condoms worsens the HIV problem. The Papal pronouncement came on the first day of his visit. Believing that the power of the word is more effective than the power of the prophylactic, he said that the proven most effective way to prevent the spread of AIDS is to just say no. He said to reporters on his plane that: “You can’t resolve it [AIDS] with the distribution of condoms. On the contrary” said he “it increases the problem.”

Long before AIDS had become a prominent member of society, the Pope and his predecessors opposed any means of artificial contraception. Once AIDS made its appearance, the Senior Vatican officials adopted the position that the most effective way of preventing the spread of AIDS, aside from remaining faithful to one’s partner, was avoiding sex. Although the thousands of sexual abuse suits that have been brought against the Church and settled, conclusively prove that avoiding sex is easier said than done, the Vatican Officials are undeterred. The Church remains firmly opposed to condoms while nonetheless proclaiming itself a leader in the fight against AIDS.

Twenty-two million people are infected with AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa according to UNAIDS. Two-thirds of all the deaths in the world from AIDS took place in that part of the world. The Church’s position distresses those who instead of contemplating the disease from the bubble of the Popemobile must work with its victims on a daily basis. Speaking to a reporter from the Washington Post, a teacher in Yaounde said: “Talking about the non-use of condoms is out of place. We need condoms to protect ourselves against diseases and AIDS.” Echoing those sentiments Rebecca Hodes with the Treatment Action Campaign in South Africa said: “[H]is opposition to condoms conveys that religious dogma is more important to him than the lives of Africans.” She’s got that right. Even some of the Pope colleagues, if not equals, differ with the Pope. Monsignor Illidio Leandro, a Portuguese bishop has said that people with AIDS are “morally obliged to use them.” Acknowledging the fact that some folks can’t avoid sex he said such people are “morally obliged to avoid passing on the disease by using a condom.” The Bishop is a realist.

The Church and witchcraft have one thing in common. Neither believes condoms will prevent the spread of AIDS, the Pope because he doesn’t believe they work and followers of witchcraft because they know witches give AIDS to those they dislike. It will be hard to reduce the AIDS epidemic in Africa. That’s because it’s hard to teach those whose creed is ignorance.

How Obama proved his mettle at the G20 summit

How Obama proved his mettle at the G20 summit
Vast multinational conferences, like the G20 summit in London, are useful mainly for the "bilaterals"—the one-on-one side-room conversations—and, in these forums, President Barack Obama is living up to high expectations.

Which is to say, the United States seems to be returning to diplomatic basics—a development that in the wake of the last eight years is practically revolutionary.

Take Obama's meeting on April 1 with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, which produced an unusually substantive 19-paragraph joint statement laying out a broad but specific agenda—all stemming from a cleareyed, even somewhat steely grasp of what international relations are all about.

"What I believe we began today," Obama said at a joint press conference afterward, "is a very constructive dialogue that will allow us to work on issues of mutual interest."

The italics are mine, but a "senior administration official" also drew attention to the phrase in a background press briefing and contrasted the approach with George W. Bush's first meeting with a Russian president, after which he proclaimed that he'd looked into Vladimir Putin's eyes and seen his soul.

The Medvedev meeting, then, marked the occasion when Obama officially pushed that "reset button." The move was recognized as such by Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who noted a "new atmosphere of trust," stemming not just from personal camaraderie—which, he said, creates only "the illusion of good relations"—but from recognition of "mutual interests" and a "readiness to listen to each other." Lavrov added, "We missed this much in the past years."

Former Bush aides have told me that their boss got a bad rap for his remark about Putin's eyes and soul. When he made the comment on his first trip to Europe in June 2001, he had decided to scrap the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty so that he could build a missile-defense system. He felt he had to assure Putin that the decision was not aimed at Russia, which at the time was extraordinarily weak; he also wanted to cultivate Russia as a counterweight to China. In short, Bush's remark was driven, these officials said, by motives of grand strategy.

Maybe so, but that only makes his statement seem daffier. Did Bush believe that chumming up to Putin, treating him like a "good man," would melt his resistance and lure him to our side? The only question is whether, deep inside, the ex-KGB spy gaped at Bush's naiveté or bristled at his condescension.

What Putin would have been keener to hear at that moment—what all leaders with an understanding of history and the requirements of their office want to know in diplomatic dealings generally—is what was on the table that could serve his nation's interests.

At his press conference on Wednesday, Obama emphasized that the United States and Russia have serious differences and that he wouldn't paper over them; from the start, he told Medvedev to forget about recognition of Abkhazia or South Ossetia as independent states, and he protested the beating of prominent human rights activist Lev Ponomaryov. But Obama also said he wouldn't let those differences get in the way of vital matters—such as nuclear proliferation, counterterrorism, regional conflicts, and international trade—where cooperation could promote (again) the interests of both countries.

The only thing remarkable about this sentiment is that compared with policy statements of just a few months ago, it's so remarkable.

Bush's diplomacy tended to the black and white: I get along with you, or I don't; you're with us, or you're against us; you're a terrorist, or you're opposed to terrorists. This approach led—and, in general, leads—to disaster not because it's moralistic, but because it so egregiously misapprehends the world and leaves us with so little leverage to affect it.

For instance, Obama will almost certainly open up talks with Syria as a means of isolating Iran and cutting off both countries' links with Hezbollah. Bush always opposed any contact—and vetoed efforts by some of his top officials to go that route—because Syria supported terrorists. By this argument, had someone with this view been president during World War II, the United States wouldn't have struck up an alliance with the Soviet Union against Nazi Germany on the grounds that Stalin wasn't much less evil than Hitler—and we would have faced catastrophic defeat in our high moral dudgeon.

This is, in part, why Obama has abandoned the phrase "global war on terror." It implies that all terrorist movements form a single bloc of equal weight and danger; and it therefore prevents us from even contemplating the notion of splitting the movements apart or playing off one against the others. One definition of skillful diplomacy is to unite allies and divide enemies; Bush's pronouncements tended to do the precise opposite.

To the extent that Bush racked up some successes in his last two years, it was because he abandoned his precepts. The "surge" in Iraq achieved as much as it did (in tactical military terms, anyway) because it coincided with a new strategy that forged alliances with Sunni insurgents—former enemies—in the interest of defeating a larger common enemy. (Too bad the war's first four years killed so many people and tore up so much of the country.) The North Koreans agreed to halt their plutonium reprocessing because Bush finally agreed to hold serious negotiations. (Too bad they built and tested a nuclear weapon in the time that he refused to negotiate as a matter of misplaced principle.)

American leaders and diplomats have long struggled with the tension between their interests and ideals. Bush finessed the issue by pretending that the tension didn't exist. In his second inaugural address, he declared that our interests and ideals coincided, invoking an appealing but empty syllogism: Tyranny sires terrorism; terrorism threatens our security; therefore, promoting democracy enhances our security; hence, our interests and our ideals are one. The problem was that terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy, and democracy is not necessarily a cure for it in any case. (Hamas won fair and free elections in the Palestinian territories—elections that Bush insisted on, over the advice of many, on the premise that Hamas couldn't win the election because terrorism and democracy were incompatible.)

Obama seems to be aware of the tension between interests and ideals without letting it paralyze policymaking. In this sense, he is like most presidents in American history—and his foreign policy, or for the moment his approach to foreign policy, signals a restoration of what was once called statecraft: literally, the art of conducting the affairs of state. The term has always implied a meshing of interests and ideals with reality while navigating the shoals of a dangerous world. Leaders can try to reshape an agenda, but they can't toss away maps or ignore laws of physics to get there. They have to deal with the world as it is, and that's what Obama seems to be doing.