LAURA BUSH CALLS FOR DEMOCRACY -- OH BOY

BULLETIN: Laura Bush Calls on Burmese Junta to Allow Democracy

As Channukah comes to a close, it appears our darling First Lady has been eating LSD-laced latkes. As First Lady of all the people she has developed Chutzpah, and now if she and her hubby will step down and stop stealing elections, maybe we can return to some form of democracy in the U.S. too.

Also, take notice that Venezuela's sanity-challenged Hugo Chavez nevertheless obeys the voters when he loses a close one, as opposed to some people who call up their daddy's pals to put in the final fix.

WHEN WE GET TO MARS MAYBE WE CAN FORGET ALL ABOUT IRAQ

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Maybe you're wondering why all those members of Congress, Republicans and Democrats both, are preparing to give Bush the funding he needs to continue the war. Well they just might feel everybody's being too demanding of a President who's been forced to spend much of his energy putting together the glorious trip to Mars he promised us in 2004. Did you forget all about that? Well, he didn't. He's just not that kind of guy, and Congress knows it, even if the rest of us don't.

So Congress must figure that as soon as he gets the space thing out of the way, he'll solve these little Iraq glitches with his usual flair and incisiveness because the fact that we have no mission there and Iraqi citizens overwhelmingly say it's OK to kill U.S. troops and our people are dying and being maimed and crippled for nothing and the average Baghdad family is sitting each night in the dark without running water or a working sewer system, and gangs of freaked-out gunmen are running around outside abducting and torturing people and this Maliki government we're supposed to root for is closely tied to the murderous, psychotic Mahdi Army that's been bombing and shooting our troops for year is dwarfed by our glorious leader's ability to take care of the whole mess as soon as our astronauts set up a Martian golf course.

I guess it turns out when they voted Bush permission to go into Iraq and seize the WMDs these people in Congress also voted to garrison the place forever, all of which apparently makes terrific sense to Democrats like Diane Feinstein who routinely give Bush everything he asks for in Iraq and then complain about his policy. I'm growing a bit weary of the Feinsteins of this world, but I'll just try to focus on how great everything's going to be when we get to Mars.

BEYOND THE SURGE -- A TIDE OF BULLSHIT

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman
Reality Weather Service put out a bulletin today warning of a surge of bullshit sweeping out of Washington. Residents around the globe were told to wear raingear, particularly when digesting media interpretations of this astonishing weather pattern, which had conventional meteorologists baffled.
CBS, CNN, et al were preparing to inform us the bullshit surge smells like a rose, making it terribly dangerous for anyone who still hasn’t developed some kind of bullshit detector.
Don’t panic. Stay in your homes unless you have the gumption to take to the streets because enough is fucking enough.

Meanwhile, Democrats in Congress already slavishly accepting the surge as a successful strategy even though the doctoring of the statistics have already been unmasked, were preparing to surrender to this bullshit without a fight. Bush’s’ revived threat to withhold supplies from troops in the field gave them their clearest path to his impeachment and removal from office, but they lacked the brains, imagination, and guts to make the journey.
If Congress refuses to fund the war and our chicken hawk-in-chief leaves our troops out there without supplies, Congress should of course exercise its constitutional authority to send him packing within 24 hours. So Congress would lose a little sleep. Big deal. The seven U.S. troops killed in Anbar during one day last week gave up more than that. Then it would be Deferement Dick’s turn to pull the same crazy bullshit, and then Speaker of the House Pelosi would be president. She’s a craven Pelosi, but at least she knows the difference between Australia and Austria, making her a big improvement over what we’ve got. Besides, impeaching and jailing her predecessors just might light enough of a fire under her ass to prompt her to do what’s right.

I know the accompanying photo is upsetting. It upset me too. But we should all understand what they're doing with our tax dollars as we continue to let the same people who got us into this mess -- the same people who've never been right about this war -- tell us what to do next.

QUESTIONS ON WAR, PEACE & HILLARY'S BUTT

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Consider me still on a blog break, but here are questions I've been asking myself, and I wondered if anyone out there could help me answer them:

The Democrats won control of Congress, and very quickly we had 30,000 more U.S. troops in Iraq, our casualties increased, and Democrats continued funding the war. So what did we get out of it?
If Hillary and Obama really opposed the war, wouldn’t they spell out when they’d pull our troops out?
If all the Sunni states in the Mideast know Maliki is just a stooge for Iran, how come the U.S. government doesn’t get it?
Isn’t there a law anywhere that says Dick Cheney can’t continue fixing no-bid contracts for Halliburton while he hangs on to its stock?

Why aren’t all those administrators at the FCC who took free vacations from the corporations they were supposed to regulate in jail?
Why do all those people in Congress get away with accepting “donations” from fat cats and then letting them write legislation like the Medicare prescription clause that fixes into law the concept that drug companies will wholesale their products to the government at retail prices?
Does Bush still consider himself a compassionate conservative while throwing $8 billion a month at his war to nowhere and promising to veto $7 billion a year for a children’s health care program that's proved its worth a hundred times over?

Nancy Pelosi took Bush’s impeachment “off the table” after his administration had already admitted tapping phones and intercepting mail and email without warrants. He and Cheney are still repeating the same lies about Iraq that were refuted years ago. His avalanche of signing statements tell us plainly he refuses to enforce acres of law. What’s a guy have to do to get impeached around here?

After the Bush dynasty hands the presidency back to the Clinton dynasty will the throne have to be retrofitted to handle Hillary’s butt? (That's her on the right in the accompanying photo)

GOLDMAN BEGINS HIATUS -- WORLD DOESN'T STOP

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Hi Readers. I started this blog not so much because I was enraged by the everyday actions of this criminal regime in Washington. What really got to me was the reaction of our citizens -- or the lack of it. About 28 percent are hardcore fascists who'll follow Bush into the gates of hell, and almost all the rest are strolling through the mall and watching American Idol.

Also, I was personally pinpointed by these ongoing horrors because I have a son in the Army who's already done one tour in Iraq and is set to do another. The worst predictions in 1984, Brave New World, and a host of other fantasies are being realized, and most people don't care enough to react as long as no one in their family is being sent to Iraq by the likes of Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, and their Washington entourage.

I'm not so egocentric as to believe that those people not reading my blog are automatically wretches. But I've sold non-fiction commentaries to some pretty substantial publications over the years as over-the-transom submissions, so I know my stuff can't all be substandard. But the New York Times, L.A. Times, etc, and even publications like The Nation are operated by jealous cliques and impose certain rules and boundaries I found increasingly tiresome. I really haven't figured out this Internet marketing thing, and I've had fewer than 2,000 "unique visitors," according to the free service that measures this stuff for me.

I don't want to put crappy stuff on this blog under my name, but right now I don't have the time or the inclination to put up polished stuff for such a small audience (for the great people like your who are reading this).

I recently sold my novel The Barfighter and am working on another, and will continue to focus more of my attention on my novels because oddly enough you can write more about the truth as you see it under the umbrella of fiction. I'll also continue doing boxing commentary in The Ring magazine because it's still a joy -- except when I'm on deadline. The accompanying photo is fairly recent. I'm eating free grub supplied by Shane Mosley. If you don't know what Shane looks like and so can't figure out which of us is which, he's the one with lots more money and a great attitude.

For now I plan to put stuff up on this blog from time to time when I come across something that I believe is really worth your attention. But I'm told if you don't put up new stuff all the time you lose your audience. We'll see. I'm also going to Europe pretty soon -- just for a few weeks -- and I'll see how I feel about this blog when I return. Maybe I'll find some magic formula to build a bigger audience. Thanks for sticking with me.

Best wishes & up the ass of the ruling class,

Ivan G.

BRIT LOOKS AT BLOOMBERG

[This is neither an endorsement nor a declaration against Bloomberg's possible independent candidacy. The idea of another Republican creepoid in the White House due to a replay of Ralph Nader's 2000 bid is frankly terrifying. But it's interesting to look at this topic from the perspective of a canny British observer. -- I.G.]

By Matt Frei
BBC News, Washington
New York City is frequently derided as being too eccentric, sophisticated and "European" to belong to the real America. Michael Bloomberg has billions of dollars and is willing to spend them

When it comes to elections, it has always been the stage for lavish fundraisers, mined for cash by both sides, but largely ignored as a source of coveted votes because New York tends to vote Democrat and hasn't swung - in electoral terms - for decades.

So wouldn't it be funny if the three names on the presidential ballot in 2008 all hailed from the Empire State?

Did I say three?

Here's the imaginary list: Hillary Clinton, the junior senator from New York in the Democratic corner; Rudy Giuliani, the former Mayor of New York, in the Republican corner; and current Mayor Michael Bloomberg somewhere in the middle, hovering as an independent candidate, an antibody in Washington party politics, stealing disaffected voters from both parties.

The rumour has been tickling Washington's political gonads for months now.

It goes without saying that the mayor himself continues to deny any intentions to run for the White House, which is bread-and-butter Beltway rhetoric.

But the blogosphere went into high gear this week after Mr. Bloomberg took it upon himself to announce that he was quitting the Republican Party with the stinging rebuke that "every successful elected executive knows that real results are more important than partisan battles".

This may be less of a slap in the face than it appears, since he only joined the Republican ranks in 2001 when he wanted to become mayor of New York. But why announce the divorce at all?

Moreover Mr Bloomberg was speaking not on his home turf but in that other bastion of coastal sophistication, California, on what looked suspiciously like a campaign tour.

The mayor himself may be denying presidential ambitions but his friend, the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, has given him the thumbs up.

"He would make an excellent candidate for the White House!" Arnie yodelled and then smiled like a split watermelon.

Mr Bloomberg's own entourage has been feeding the cyber beasts with quotes about a candidacy, quashing previous rumours that the mayor may want to run as a vice-presidential candidate.

"He's an alpha male," his friend and adviser Professor Mitchell Moss recently told reporters.

The 5ft 7in (1.70m) alpha male, who comes from a family of Polish Jews and was the son of a book-keeper, certainly has a lot going for him.

He has been elected twice as mayor of New York and his Midas touch, first as a partner at Salomon Bros, the investment bank, and then as the founder of the Bloomberg financial news and data service has pocketed him, according to Forbes Magazine, no less than $5.5 billion (£2.75bn).

He has the cash and, as his campaigns in New York have shown, he is ready to spend it. He laid out $73m (£36.6m) to win City Hall in 2001 and another $80m (£40m) to do so again in 2005.

As an independent candidate, he won't need to run in the party primaries and so he can lavish a whopping half a billion dollars on the presidential campaign at the very least, without spending more than 10% of his money.

Echoes of Perot

At worst, that's a handy tax write-off. And that brings to mind another short candidate who disliked the Bush family and ran as a loner.

Ross Perot split the Republican vote and cost George HW Bush dear

Do you remember Ross Perot? He was the independent candidate who ran in 1992 with a face like an extra-terrestrial and a voice like a duck.

He hardly spent any of his own money and had no message beyond his loathing for Beltway politics.

But even he managed to get 19% of the vote in the presidential ballot.

Since most of his support defected from the Republican camp, he split the right and thus cost George HW Bush the election.

So imagine what Mr Bloomberg could do. Thanks to the war in Iraq and a corroded faith in the ability of politics to fix America's ills, the country is far more disaffected now than it was in 1992. The mood is ripe for an independent. Mr Bloomberg has more money than Mr Perot and, crucially, is willing to spend it.

Michael Bloomberg even rides the New York subway to work. He has managed the world's grittiest and whiniest city for more than five years and still enjoys a 70% approval rating.
And he has a message: Mr Bloomberg was against the war in Iraq and he is for gay rights, gun control and abortion.

He is where many moderate Republicans, Democrats and undecided voters are. He is in that place where that other mayor, Rudy Giuliani, would probably like to be if he didn't have to undergo the contortions foisted upon him by the Republican primaries.

And Michael Bloomberg, the Master of the Universe, takes the subway to work.

Political Viagra

At this stage you might be tempted to change the monograms on the White House face towels already. But not so fast!

Bloomberg has money and brains but as a campaigner he's the driest biscuit in the box.

His electoral chemistry is well nigh inert and he would have to make a virtue of his dour style.

But as my friend, the pollster Frank Luntz, has pointed out: "With this much money in your pocket it doesn't matter if you're dry, what matters is the calculation: can I win?"

This is where it gets tricky. The bedrock party support for the Democrats is estimated to be around 39% of likely voters.

These are the people who would vote Democrat even if a potted plant were on the ballot paper.

These days the Republicans can count on only about 30% of cast-iron loyalty.

According to Mr Luntz this has two consequences: the first is that Mr Bloomberg is unlikely to win, even with all his cash, appeal and the current degree of disaffection.

Secondly, he is far more likely to steal Republican voters at a time when the Grand Old Party desperately needs independent voters to get into the White House. Rudy Giuliani should be far more worried by a Bloomberg candidacy than Hillary Clinton.

But if he thinks he can't win, why should Mr Bloomberg, a results-driven executive, even bother to run?

Because even if he never got to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, he wouldn't exactly be missing any meals and he might just make the history books.

If that's not political Viagra for a 65-year-old, unmarried, 5ft 7in, alpha-male billionaire, then what is?

WHERE ARE THE NEW FDR'S AND LINCOLNS?

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Instead of comparing our presidential candidates to each other, why not compare them to past presidents? We don't because it’s been pretty well accepted that we will never seek the likes of an FDR or Lincoln again, so get with it and settle for what’s out there.
But you have to ask yourself why, if the 1930s could give us an FDR, and the 1860s a Lincoln, couldn’t the 2000s find us another clear thinker and doer like them -- a decent, take-charge human being who's not loony -- from a population that’s more than twice the size now than it was in 1932?

The answer is, we still have people like FDR and Lincoln around, but they don’t run for office. That's because our system requires presidential candidates to spend years traveling around the country begging for campaign money from rich people.
So we wind up with some really defective personalities as candidates. Then we’re told we must choose one of these screwy people. That’s practically as stupid as saying we’ll just continue doing what we’re doing in Iraq until a nice, friendly democracy rises from the rubble there whose citizens won’t mind if Big Oil carts off their petroleum at a cut rate.
This Bush dynasty, father and son, did everything they possibly could to keep our elections crippled by the brute force of plutocratic dollars. George I vetoed campaign reform, and when George II saw he’d have to let something through, he and his compadres made sure McCain-Feingold was so shot full of holes it did nothing except change the name of campaign kitties.

LET'S PRETEND
Donations are unlimited as long as they’re made to groups that pretend they aren’t coordinating their activities with the candidates’ campaigns. Just as politicians pretend the favors they do for their big contributors at the expense of everyone else aren’t related to those contributions. And more than half the states allow corporations to give money directly to the campaigns.
The result is that the race is not always to the swift, just as Ecclesiastes tells us, but also, election-wise, it is never, ever won by people lacking this defective beg-mongering chromosome. So guess what? Our front-runners from both parties, Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani, are both twisted, egomaniacal liars who don't mind kissing ass for the right price. Just what their biggest contributors were looking for.

IRAQ: 155,000 U.S. TROOPS ON SNIPE HUNT

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Take a serious look at this administration’s announced goal of creating a secure democracy in Iraq. It means that at some point the balance scale will reveal -- Eureka, everything’s hunky dory over there -- and we may exit as proud victors.

Precisely where is that point? When the murders and kidnapping stop? Because people get bumped off or kidnapped once in awhile even in relatively peaceful cities like Copenhagen. Does Baghdad have to become another Copenhagen? Or should we settle, say, for Los Angeles, which has about 950 homicides a year? Obviously we can’t hold out for perfection. But how much distance from perfection is the Bush brain trust willing to settle for?
Moving on to the goal of democracy, you’ll find another amorphous goal, and one that has arguably been met already. Iraq has an elected government. It’s not functioning like a Lexus, but the fact that there was some kind of election creating this Parliament is in fact evidence of democracy, precisely as Bush, Inc. claimed after the voting took place. But that wasn’t enough for our wartime president. Clearly he’s bent on the country having a good elected government. Define good.

WHERE'S NATO ARMADA?
In our own country we have a Louisiana congressman recently caught with $90,000 in his freezer, indicating perhaps we don’t have a perfectly functioning democracy. Go back a little further and you find we had two presidential elections in a row decided under less than perfect electoral circumstances (See Florida in 2000, Iowa in 2004). Should the rest of NATO send over an armada to repair American democracy?

This mission that Bush, Inc. spelled out for Iraq was never more than a quicky excuse it came up with when the original announced purposes were proved false. Security and democracy sounded to the war’s creators like good substitutes to fill in for nonexistent WMD programs and nonexistent ties to al-Qaeda while they held on to the oilfields and Bush settled his personal daddy business with Saddam.

Now we have 155,000 troops over there on a snipe hunt so a pack of liars can try to prove it’s not a pack of liars. Everyone who’s been to summer camp understands a snipe hunt. You send new kids out in the forest with sacks and tell them to come back with some snipes, and all of them are too embarrassed to admit they don’t know what a snipe is (it isn’t anything).

It’s hard to believe our country has continued on this loony road to nowhere for more than four years. Under any sane system, Bush, Cheney et al would have been kicked out of office long ago and be writing their memoirs in prison.

Yet when you look at the words of presidential candidates in both major parties, just about none of them will provide a clear-cut statement that he or she will stop hunting snipes -- certainly none of the “major” candidates. To find someone who makes such a flat declaration you have to dig down to smaller players like Dennis Kucinich, who’s been deemed non-presidential by Big Media and Big Election Money.

So the snipe hunt continues. Democracy and security. You know, we could use some of that ourselves.

U.N. FINDS 94% OF EGYPTIAN GIRLS CIRCUMCISED; NO LAW AGAINST IT, MUBARAK'S WIFE CONCEDES

The following are excerpts from an interview with Egyptian First Lady Suzanne Mubarak, which aired on Al-Arabiya TV on March 8, 2007, as transcribed by MEMRI (Middle East Research Institute)
Interviewer: "According to the 2005 UNDP report, 94% of all girls in Egypt undergo circumcision. What have you, in the National Council for Women, been doing about this, and to what extent are these statistics accurate?"

Suzanne Mubarak: "These statistics are clearly incorrect, because they go to some village, and select all the women aged 35 and up. These women have all, indeed, been subjected to this. But if we were to conduct statistics on the younger age groups... Today, we are working to protect them from this procedure. We have a national plan, through the National Council for Childhood and Motherhood, and this is its main concern now. We go to the villages... This too, goes back to the culture, which is based on mistaken concepts. It has nothing to do with religion. Although some people say it is required by the religion, the vast majority of the Arab and Islamic countries do not practice these violations."

Interviewer: "But in African countries..."
Suzanne Mubarak: "They inherited it from the African or Pharaonic culture, thousands of years ago. Based on this, we have a national, comprehensive, and strategic plan, which we began to implement three years ago. We've begun to talk... At first, this procedure was something nobody talked about much."

Interviewer: "Because it hadn't reached the Western media, but the moment there was a scandal, people began to talk about it."
Suzanne Mubarak: "Today, we talk about it with complete openness. We are dealing with it as something that must come to an end, and, Allah willing, it will come to an end soon. We conduct campaigns to promote awareness among mothers, grandmothers, and mothers-in-law. You'd be surprised, but it is the women themselves who lack this awareness. We also urge that it not be conducted outside hospitals, and that it be performed only in cases where it is medically required. We admit that this is insufficient, and we are working through the council... One of our missions is to submit new bills for legislation, in order to completely ban this procedure."

Interviewer: "Why is there no law that prohibits..."
Suzanne Mubarak: "Allah willing, it will happen. Soon..."

Interviewer: "When?"
Suzanne Mubarak: "I can't tell you when, but we are working on it."

QUESTIONS BUSH IS NEVER ASKED

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

When you ran for President you promised service members that help was on the way. A new report ordered by Congress informs us that 40 percent of soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan have psychological problems, that the mechanism to help them has broken down, and many are punished for their afflictions. A situation like this doesn’t happen overnight. There must have been warnings. Why did you allow this to happen?

Eighty percent of casualties in Iraq, where more than 3,500 U.S. service people have already died, are caused by improvised explosive devices. Two years ago the Marines requested 1,100 mine-resistant vehicles and the Pentagon didn’t order them or send them. The Army is in similar dire straits. Why did you allow this to happen?

In various legal filings, the prosecutor said both Karl Rove and Scooter Libby told several reporters about Valerie Plame's employment at the CIA. Why haven’t you fired Rove for damaging this country's security in order to cast doubt on the account of her husband who exercised his constitutional right to reveal you'd made a false claim to the nation that Saddam had been seeking weapons-grade uranium from Niger?

Vice President Dick Cheney, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, continues to claim a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Why haven’t you admonished him for spreading this false idea and told him to cut it out?

The Downing Street Memo informs us that the British saw no evidence your Administration devised a post-invasion plan for Iraq. Would you agree? If you disagree, how have would you categorize that plan now in retrospect?

Your political appointee in the Pentagon, Mr. Wolfowitz, was a key instigator in your disastrous invasion of Iraq. You promoted him to head the World Bank, where he was fired for corruption. Got any more plans for Wolfowitz?

Your administration for years conducted a secret, warrantless, wiretapping program involving millions of phone calls, emails, and posted mail. When you were caught, you claimed you didn’t need warrants. Courts ruled otherwise. Even your first attorney general ruled otherwise. How do you justify these acts in view of your oath to uphold the Constitution?

Though you don't call it torture, your administration does in fact continue to torture suspected enemy captives even though experts tell us this is counter-productive. Explain why this doesn't undermine our argument when we demand moral behavior in places like Darfur.

Alberto Gonzalez’s conflicting testimony that he had nothing to do with firing U.S. attorneys for political reasons and then that he couldn’t remember doing so has been flatly contradicted by a wealth of documents and eyewitness testimony. What message does it send to America when its chief law enforcement officer exhibits these behaviors?

Why does your Administration continue to ignore congressional subpoenas in this and other matters?

You continue to claim pre-war intelligence showed invading Iraq was warranted. But the Downing Street Memo shows that the "case was thin" so "facts and the intelligence" were being "fixed around the policy." To what extent did Iraq's petroleum reserves play a part in your decision to invade?

Explain the difference between Shiite and Sunni beliefs and provide us background on the historical rift between them. When did you become aware of this division?

Why, unlike other wartime presidents, have you refused to attend funerals of fallen service people from the Iraq war?

Why does your Administration refuse to allow photographs of caskets returning from Iraq?

How many more U.S. troops must be sacrificed, as Bill Moyers put it, on the altar of your ego before you admit you were wrong to invade Iraq and that our occupation there only makes things worse at home and in the Middle East and is a boon to both Iran and al Qaeda?

You say the "enemy" despises us for our freedom. Then how can you explain why polls show that a vast majority of citizens in virtually all the democratic nations of the world despise you and your policies and that this is leaking over and making them despise our country, perhaps for generations to come?

The problems this country faces domestically and diplomatically have long appeared beyond your intellectual grasp. You answer questions about them in repetitious, simplistic generalities that fail to inspire the country’s confidence. You have no plan, for example, to deal with the nation’s awful statistics on infant mortality and longevity as compared with the rest of the developed world. Your appointees have systematically undermined programs that were in place to protect the workplace and the enivornment. Your plan to deal with the very real global warming crisis affecting us now is to keep stalling. Why won't you at least try to open your mind and go beyond your circle of myopic advisors for help?

MORE ON MINE-RESISTANT VEHICLES BUSH FLUNKIES REFUSED TO BUY FOR TROOPS

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL
The Bush administration and military leaders in Washington are always claiming that they will do anything to support American troops fighting in Iraq. That makes it all the more infuriating to learn that, for more than two years, the Pentagon largely ignored urgent requests from field commanders for better armor-protected vehicles that could have saved untold lives and limbs.

Improvised explosive devices, or I.E.D.’s, can blast through the flat underbelly of the military’s standard Humvees, maiming and killing the soldiers within. These devices, a low-tech response to America’s overwhelming military power, are now causing 70 percent to 80 percent of the American combat deaths in Iraq.
More than two years ago, according to newly disclosed documents, Marine commanders in Al Anbar Province, a center of the Sunni insurgency, submitted an urgent request for more than 1,100 Mine Resistant Ambush Protected Vehicles, or MRAPs, that have V-shaped bottoms able to deflect blasts from below. For reasons yet to be satisfactorily explained, military officials initially sat on the request and then ordered relatively few.

Some, second-guessing the judgment of the battlefield commanders, apparently felt that Humvees with upgraded armor could do the job. Others may have been reluctant to invest billions of dollars in vehicles that might have little use after Iraq. Turf battles were probably also a factor, as a large-scale purchase might threaten future weapons programs. But Iraq is the war that Americans are fighting and dying in today.

Only now are Pentagon leaders, prodded by Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. and other critics on Capitol Hill, rushing to ramp up production. Congress has accelerated funding to buy more than 7,000 of the vehicles by early next year, and the military services are seeking some 21,000 in all, at a cost that could exceed $20 billion. Defense Secretary Robert Gates has declared his determination to “produce as many of these vehicles and get them into the field as fast as possible,” though the precise number needed has yet to be established.

Unfortunately, the MRAPs will remain vulnerable to the deadliest I.E.D.’s, known as “explosively formed penetrators,” which destroy vehicles from the side. The military is looking for ways to add armor to the MRAPs and is testing another new vehicle to counter that threat.

If the small companies that make these vehicles are not able to produce the quantities needed quickly, President Bush and Secretary Gates ought to make this a crash program and enlist major manufacturers.

There can be no excuse for failing to provide the best possible protection for American troops in this disastrous war.

THE SOPRANOS: GETTING PAST FINALE PRANK

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

IT WAS A LITTLE tough to take when David Chase ended his beatified Sopranos series with a series of red herrings and a black-screen practical joke, but I guess that’s what happens when you give final cut to a mad genius. It’s a free country, even in New Jersey.

But I’m reading lots of misinterpretations of that last Sopranos episode. So here’s a bit of clarification.
No, Tony didn’t get whacked. Over a span of 86 episodes he’s proved himself very, very smart. Being aware of suspicious-looking characters is what he does all the time and what he was doing in the diner with his family.
We can assume the new head of Phil’s family, “the little man,” was tired of the war. It cost him money, so he was unlikely to send hit men after Tony. We could say the suspicious characters in the diner were feds, but the reality is they were just nasty jokes played on the viewers. Chase is the only one laughing.
No, Tony wasn’t going to be indicted after all. He discovered it was Carlo who was ratting him out to the feds. Not good for Carlo’s health. Next time he’s shopping, he needn’t lay out for extra-large shampoo or the bigger economy size of his favorite breakfast cereal.
On a happy note, there was possible good news for the environment. With Phil Leotardo’s shot head cracked and splattered under the tire of his own gas guzzler, Tony won’t have to dump asbestos in the Jersey harbor anymore. He can do business with “the little man,” who’ll let him dump it wherever he was dumping it before, which, on second thought, probably wasn’t much kinder to local ecologly than the mess he made in the harbor. Most likely an eagles preserve or something. That’s something to remember for all those environmentalists rooting for Tony. The man’s damn charming and is kind to cats and hookers, but in addition to being a serial murderer, he’s an unapologetic serial polluter.
With the immediate threat of assassination lifted, Tony can return to sick, serious gambling, Carmela to developing sub-standard housing for gullible shmucks like her own cousin, A.J. can go back to failing at everything, Meadow can return to losing at love and winning career-wise, and Paulie, regardless of whether he does or does not spot the Virgin again in the Bing, will continue being the most severely sociopathic individual in North Jersey and possibly the entire Tri-State Area. The fact that a miserable, good-for-nothing psycho like that survives while better people are getting whacked all around him is one of the most realistic elements of the show.

DOUGHNUT CRIME
One TV critic wrote that Tony’s cold-blooded murder of cousin Chris in an earlier episode placed Tony well outside the boundaries of sympathy. But if we were to hold him up to normal standards, he’d have been outside those boundaries several seasons ago. The critic forgot that in the episode previous to Chris’ demise, Chris had shot a friend in the head because, heck, Chris was in a bad mood. He also once shot a doughnut guy in the foot for laxity and disrespect, though I’m not sure if that’s a crime in Jersey.
We won’t learn whether the FBI guy who tipped off Tony about Phil’s whereabouts gets over that stomach ailment he picked up in Pakistan. The possible terrorists? The Russian mobster who got away from Paulie and Chris in the forest? They’re like so many peripheral people who slip out of our lives. Maybe they become dot-com billionaires. But I doubt it.
Okay, the last few minutes were an immature prank. But that doesn’t erase what preceded it for eight seasons – the best damn thing on TV ever.

INSATIABLE OVERCLASS GRABS BIGGER SLICE

By Barbara Ehrenreich
Twenty years ago it was risky to point out the growing inequality in America. I did it in a New York Times essay and was quickly denounced, in the Washington Times, as a "Marxist." If only. I've never been able to get through more than a couple of pages of Das Kapital, even in English, and the Grundrisse functions like Rozerem.
But it no longer takes a Marxist, real or alleged, to see that America is being polarized between the super-rich and the sub-rich everyone else. In Sunday's New York Times magazine we learn that Larry Summers, the centrist Democratic economist and former Harvard president, is now obsessed with the statistic that, since 1979, the share of pretax income going to the top 1 percent of American households has risen by 7 percentage points, to 16 percent. At the same time, the share of income going to the bottom 80 percent has fallen by 7 percentage points.
As the Times puts it: "It's as if every household in that bottom 80 percent is writing a check for $7,000 every year and sending it to the top 1 percent." Summers now admits that his former cheerleading for the corporate-dominated global economy feels like "pretty thin gruel."
But the moderate-to-conservative economic thinkers who long refused to think about class polarization have a fallback position, sketched out by Roger Lowenstein in an essay in the same issue of the New York Times magazine that features Larry Summers' sobered mood. Briefly put: As long as the middle class is still trudging along and the poor are not starving flamboyantly in the streets, what does it matter if the super-rich are absorbing an ever larger share of the national income?
In Lowenstein's view: "...whether Roger Clemens, who will get something like $10,000 for every pitch he throws, earns 100 times or 200 times what I earn is kind of irrelevant. My kids still have health care, and they go to decent schools. It's not the rich people who are pulling away at the top who are the problem..."
GREED MATTERS

Well, there is a problem with the super-rich, several of them in fact. A bloated overclass can drag down a society as surely as a swelling underclass.
First, the Clemens example distracts from the reality that a great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class: Every year, 4 or 5 of the people on Forbes magazine's list of the ten richest Americans carry the surname Walton, meaning they are the children, nieces, and nephews of Wal-Mart's founder. You think it's a coincidence that this union-busting low-wage retail empire happens to have generated a $200 billion family fortune?
Second, though a lot of today's wealth is being made in the financial industry, by means that are occult to the average citizen and do not seem to involve much labor of any kind, we all pay a price, somewhere down the line. All those late fees, puffed up interest rates and exorbitant charges for low-balance checking accounts do not, as far as I can determine, go to soup kitchens.
Third, the overclass bids up the price of goods that ordinary people also need -- housing, for example. Gentrification is dispersing the urban poor into overcrowded suburban ranch houses, while billionaires' horse farms displace the rural poor and middle class. Similarly, the rich can swallow tuitions of $40,000 and up, making a college education increasingly a privilege of the upper classes.
POLITICS TITLED TOWARD RICH
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the huge concentration of wealth at the top is routinely used to tilt the political process in favor of the wealthy. Yes, we should acknowledge the philanthropic efforts of exceptional billionaires like George Soros and Bill Gates. But if we don't end up with universal health insurance in the next few years, it won't be because the average American isn't pining for relief from escalating medical costs. It may well turn out to be because Hillary Clinton is, as The Nation reports, "the number-one Congressional recipient of donations from the healthcare industry." And who do you think demanded those Bush tax cuts for the wealthy -- the AFL-CIO.
Lowenstein notes, that "if the very upper crust were banished to a Caribbean island, the America that remained would be a lot more egalitarian." Well, duh. The point is that it would also be more prosperous, at the individual level, and democratic. In fact, why give the upper crust an island in the Caribbean? After all they've done for us recently, I think the Aleutians should be more than adequate.
Barbara Ehrenreich’s books include Nickel and Dimed.
http://ehrenreich.blogs.com/barbaras_blog/

RICHARDSON DISQUALIFIED BY OLYMPIC BLUNDER

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

When you have lots of applicants for a position, one way to sift through them is to use the process of elimination. Implementing this method, I just eliminated my second Democratic candidate from the presidential derby. The first was Hillary Clinton, a cynical supporter of the war in Iraq long after it became clear to even the stupidest of people that it was a pointless debacle. She also promises a shared Ferdinand & Isabella kind of administration with her hubby, which would foist their weird relationship on the whole world. Also, she may be the only Democratic candidate capable of losing the general election.
Now the second to be eliminated is New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who recently threatened to pull the U.S. out of the Peking Olympics as a tool to pressure China over the Darfur genocide.
“This is what I would do," Richardson said when asked about how he would try to bring peace to the region. "Number one, more U.N. peacekeepers. The government is refusing to make this happen. Secondly, economic sanctions. We've imposed them, but they're weak. We need European countries to make them happen. Third, we need China, to lean on China, which has enormous leverage over Darfur. And if the Chinese don't want to do this, we say to them, maybe we won't go to the Olympics."
THREATENS TO REPEAT BLUNDER
Boycotting the 1980 Moscow Games was one of the stupidest decisions of the Carter administration. Done in reaction to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it accomplished nothing diplomatically but was a cruel, mindless blow to thousands of athletes and hurt one of the greatest vehicles for world peace in modern history. Every four years Earthlings get together and compete in peaceful athletics. Why ruin it? Ask Carter. He politicized and ruined two successive Olympics because the Eastern Bloc retaliated with a boycott of its own for the ’84 games in Los Angeles. Richardson had 27 years to study the dismal results of this monumentally idiotic decision and so misunderstands it that he threatens to repeat it.
We have a President who read aloud from a children’s book for seven minutes after he was informed the nation was under attack. Then he ran away and flew Air Force One in circles for seven hours. We don’t need any more panicky presidents. We need people who can handle pressure.
Richardson is a smart guy. So is Carter. But they’re smart people who make dumb decisions under pressure, which isn’t any better than a dumb person making dumb decisions. The results are the same. So long, Richardson. I’m pulling you out of the game.

BUSHED ARMY: FORCES STRAINED BY SHAMEFUL WHITE HOUSE TREATMENT

By Andrew J. Bacevich,
THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE

COURTING THE SOLDIER vote during the 2000 presidential campaign, the candidate made this simple promise: “Help is on the way.” Throughout the 1990s, Republicans had regularly lambasted the Clinton administration for misusing America’s military and for failing to show soldiers proper respect. Electing George W. Bush was supposed to fix that.
The electoral strategy paid off handsomely: the absentee votes of soldiers helped Bush carry Florida and claim the Oval Office. Yet rather than delivering help, the Bush administration has since subjected the Armed Forces of the United States to sustained abuse. The scandal at Walter Reed is not some isolated blemish on an otherwise admirable record. It is emblematic of the way that this administration has treated soldiers.
Granted, President Bush never passes up the chance to pose with the troops or express his warm regard for those who serve and sacrifice. But to judge by results rather than posturing, no commander in chief in American history has cared less about the overall health of America’s Armed Forces.
President Bush will hand over to his successor an Army and Marine Corps that are badly depleted and verging on exhaustion. The real surge is not the one that involves sending more U.S. troops to Baghdad. It is the tidal wave of unsustainable demands that are now engulfing America’s ground forces.
Last year retired Gen. Colin Powell declared that the Army is “about broken.” A growing chorus of other senior officers, active and retired, has chimed in, endorsing Powell’s view. Unless the Bush administration finds ways to ease the strain, retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey recently told a Senate committee, “The Army will unravel.” Lt. Gen. Clyde A. Vaughn, chief of the Army National Guard, complains, “we have absolutely piecemealed our force to death.”
There is plenty of evidence to support these gloomy assessments. Only a third of the regular Army’s brigades qualify as combat-ready. In the reserve components, none meet that standard. When the last of the units reaches Baghdad as part of the president’s strategy of escalation, the U.S. will be left without a ready-to-deploy land force reserve.

REPEATED COMBAT TOURS
The stress of repeated combat tours is sapping the Army’s lifeblood. Especially worrying is the accelerating exodus of experienced leaders. The service is currently short 3,000 commissioned officers. By next year, the number is projected to grow to 3,500. The Guard and reserves are in even worse shape. There the shortage amounts to 7,500 officers. Young West Pointers are bailing out of the Army at a rate not seen in three decades. In an effort to staunch the losses, that service has begun offering a $20,000 bonus to newly promoted captains who agree to stay on for an additional three years. Meanwhile, as more and more officers want out, fewer and fewer want in: ROTC scholarships go unfilled for a lack of qualified applicants.
To sustain the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Pentagon has resorted to a variety of management techniques, all of which have the effect of increasing the strains on the force and watering down its quality. In April, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates ordered the standard combat tours of Army units extended from 12 months to 15. More time in the combat zone means less time to refit and retrain between tours and to reconnect with families.
As the Army depletes its inventory of equipment—some $212 billion worth has been destroyed, damaged, or just plain worn out—the best of what’s left ends up in Iraq and Afghanistan. One consequence is that units preparing to deploy don’t have the wherewithal needed to train. As military analyst Andrew Krepinevich told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “The Army is forced to play a shell game with its equipment.” The problem is especially acute in National Guard and reserve units, some now being activated for second combat tours.
There’s also a second shell game. The Army is incrementally easing its recruiting standards, enlisting thousands of volunteers that the service would previously have classified as unfit. Last year, the Army raised its maximum enlistment age from 35 to 40 and then to 42. The percentage of high school drop-outs entering the force has reached its highest level since 1981. The number of “CAT IV’s”—potential recruits scoring at the lower end of the military’s standardized aptitude test —has also spiked. Perhaps most troubling is the increase in “moral waivers” issued to would-be recruits with criminal records, a history of drug use, and the like. Between 2005 and 2006, the number of waivers that the Army issued to convicted felons jumped by 30 percent.
Once you get in, there’s next to no chance of washing out. Whereas in 2005, the graduation rate in Army basic training was 82 percent, the following year it rose to 94 percent—a clear indication that training standards are eroding as the war drags on. Similarly, re-enlistment criteria are becoming more lax. The Pentagon proudly reports that each of the services continues to meet its re-up goals (helped, of course, by the offer of generous bonuses that are tax-free if the soldier re-enlists while overseas). By comparison, it does not broadcast the fact that the services meet those goals by permitting those with disciplinary infractions and mediocre records of performance to re-enlist.
DEGRADING STANDARDS

Secretary Gates has announced plans to expand both the Army and the Marine Corps. That expansion will be modest—fewer than 100,000 overall—and it will occur over a five-year period, providing no meaningful relief to the troops currently headed back to the war zone for their second, third, and even fourth tours. Almost certainly, recruiting those additional troops will mean an even greater degradation of enlistment standards.
President Bush has nickeled and dimed the nation’s fighting forces to the verge of collapse. Even today he remains oblivious to the basic problem that his administration has confronted for the past four years—too much war and too few soldiers.
The president’s attitude seems to be: sure, the military is overstretched, but let’s see if we can stretch it just a little bit more. Perhaps he figures that when the rubber band breaks, dealing with the consequences will be someone else’s problem. It’s almost enough to make one nostalgic for Bill Clinton.
Andrew J. Bacevich, a West Point graduate, is professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His son, also named Andrew J. Bacevich, a 1st Lt. serving with the Army's 1st Air Cavalry Division, was killed May 13 by a suicide bomber near Samarra, Iraq.

Copyright © 2007 The American Conservative (June 4 issue)

HOW TO BEAT FRED THOMPSON -- RUN CANDIDATE WITH HIGHER NIELSENS

DIGGING DEEPER,

By Ivan G. Goldman
IF REPUBLICANS THROW “Law & Order”’s Fred Thompson into the national campaign I’m figuring the Democrats may have to pull out all the stops and go with one of the regular panelists from “American Idol,” which has even higher ratings. I mean this is serious business, and Democrats can’t afford to be defeated in the race to the very most bottom of the inanity barrel.
Although Republicans are always crabbing about Streisand, Baldwin, and the Dixie Chicks, the fact is, they’re eating the Democrats’ lunch in celebrity politics. While Democratic stars content themselves with guest spots on Bill Maher, Republicans file for office and win. Reagan, Schwarzenegger, Thompson, the list goes on and on.
The thing to do is fight fire with fire. Check out those ratings and grab a ringer off the top. I mean, I don’t know Paula Abdul’s politics, but with Nielsens like those, who needs a brain or a heart? Wait a minute, do I hear you asking questions about substance? Now there’s a laugh. Ever hear Bush open his mouth? Okay, so after six and a half years voters are on to him. But top columnists and the like are already taking this Thompson guy seriously, an empty vessel who’s a big threat because he’s been seen by millions of Americans playing the part of a capable, decent person, and perception is everything. What’s more, because he stands for nothing he carries no negative baggage. Like somebody once said, once you can fake sincerity, you've got it made, and for years he's been jumping back and forth between playing politician and playing the part of a poltician in films and on TV. Neither he nor the public seems to know the difference. And maybe there isn't one anymore anyway. When you can pull some guy off a B movie set and call him The Great Communicator, the lines of demarcation are gone.
But if the Democrats can get to Abul before the other guys do, watch her run right over Thompson with her even higher recognition factor. And when archeologists from another planet pick through the burned out ruins of this civilization, if they can find just one DVD of our presidential debates they’ll understand everything.

NEOFASCISTS TUCKERED OUT, LIBERALS ON DECK

By Ted Rall

YAHOO!
NEW YORK--AMERICA'S EXPERIMENT with neofascism is coming to an end.
He came to office in a coup d'état and consolidated power after 9/11. George W. Bush may be our worst president in history--certainly in recent times--but he is also one of the most important. Imposing his sweeping vision on everything from the tax system to why we wage war to eliminating your right to an attorney, his legislative and stylistic legacy will long outlive his administration.
He has been wildly successful at getting what he wanted. The irony is, his radical achievements have set the stage for a dramatic political shift to the left.
In my 2004 book "Wake Up! You're Liberal!" I argued that liberalism went into crisis after winning most of the cultural battles of the 20th century--the New Deal, civil rights, equality for women, gay rights. By 1980 once dynamic ideology was reduced to defending its gains against a roll-back campaign by an insurgent New Right. In electoral politics, a dynamic party offering new proposals, even ideas recycled from previous decades, tends to defeat a party that comes off as stodgy and defensive.
Bush's neofascists find themselves in the same unenviable position as the Democrats of Jimmy Carter's time. (Old-school conservatism, Goldwater's prescription of isolationism and limited government, is dead or dormant.) Now that they've won acceptance of preemptive warfare, torture, elimination of the estate tax, and spying on American citizens, Republicans are fresh out of new ideas.
As people who lived in Nazi Germany and Communist China attest, what starts out as exciting soon turns tedious. Long stretches of political radicalism leaves citizens exhausted, overwhelmed, and longing for "normalcy." Sound familiar?
You can see the leftward shift everywhere. Bush's approval rating, 91 percent after 9/11, is at 30 percent. Even most Republicans say
Iraq is going badly. "I think this [the Iraq War] is the most expensive, stupidest thing we've ever done," says Debbie Thompson of Wilmette, Illinois, a staunch pro-war Republican. The military, from privates in Iraq to armchair generals in Washington, openly derides him and his war in the media.
Have you noticed? Those pro-war "Support Our Troops" car magnets are disappearing faster than the Clinton budget surplus.
Newt Gingrich, mastermind of the 1994 "Republican Revolution," compares Bush's current political impotence to Carter's and describes the Republican Party as in "collapse." Especially telling is that the ex-House Speaker--famous for his hard-right, take-no-prisoners style--says the GOP must move left in order to win the next election.

'MANIACALLY DUMB'
The polarizing strategy Bush used to win in 2004, Gingrich says, was "maniacally dumb" because it focused on the right-wing base to the exclusion of party moderates and has diminished the Republican Party to its worst state since Watergate. "You can't be a governing national party and write off entire regions," he tells The New Yorker.
Things look bad for the Republicans, but Democrats too are being pressured to move left.
Hillary Clinton's vote in favor of the war has become her biggest political albatross. Even Barack Obama's claim that he would have voted no if he'd been in the Senate back in 2002 is being met with skepticism. And the decision by Congressional Democrats to yield to Bush's demand for another $100 billion to finance the war, no strings attached, could reduce the enthusiasm of liberal voters--and thus their turnout--on Election Day.
Cindy Sheehan, the mother of an Army Specialist killed in Iraq who became a star of the antiwar movement, articulated the frustration of more than two-thirds of the public. "I've been wondering why I've been killing myself and wondering why the Democrats caved into
George Bush," she said on May 28. She announced that she would no longer be active in the peace movement or have anything to do with the Democratic Party.We are following the lead of South America, where decades of right-wing excesses prompted the election of socialist governments. Disgusted by politicians who don't even pretend to care about them or their concerns, American voters are finally ready to embrace progressives who work to put them first. The question is whether the Democrats will rise to the opportunity to lead them.

Ted Rall is the author of the new book "Silk Road to Ruin: Is Central Asia the New Middle East?" This post is courtesy of Yahoo! News.

BIG MEDIA'S ANALYSIS OF CHENEY: THE SORROW AND THE PITY

The June 3 New York Times editorial below, "Dick Cheney Rules," lists a series of crimes committed by the Administration's very own Elmer Fudd, then signs off with a lame one-liner instead of the very logical call for his indictment. Have rats eaten the brains of America's editorialists?

--I.G.

Dick Cheney Rules
Americans are accustomed to Vice President Dick Cheney’s waiting out a terrorist threat in a “secure undisclosed location.” Now it seems that Mr. Cheney wears the cloak of invisibility in secure disclosed locations.
The Associated Press reported that Mr. Cheney’s office ordered the Secret Service last September to destroy all records of visitors to the official vice presidential mansion — right after The Washington Post sued for access to the logs. That move was made in secret, naturally. It came out only because of another lawsuit, filed by a private group, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, seeking the names of conservative religious figures who visited the vice president’s residence.
This disdain for accountability is distressing, but not surprising. Mr. Cheney has had it on display from his first days in office, when he refused to name the energy-industry executives who met with him behind closed doors to draft an energy policy.
In a similar way, Mr. Cheney seems unconcerned about little things like checks and balances and traditional American notions of judicial process. At one point, he gave himself the power to selectively declassify documents and selectively leak them to reporters. In a recent commencement address, he declaimed against prisoners who had the gall to “demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States.”
Mr. Cheney is the driving force behind the Bush administration’s theory of the “unitary executive,” which holds that no one, including Congress and the courts, has the power to supervise or regulate the actions of the president. Just as he pays little attention to old-fangled notions of the separation of powers, Mr. Cheney does not overly bother himself about the bright line that should exist between his last job as chief of the energy giant Halliburton and his current one on the public payroll.
From 2001 to 2005, Mr. Cheney received “deferred salary payments” from Halliburton that far exceeded what taxpayers gave him. Mr. Cheney still holds hundreds of thousands of stock options that have ballooned by millions of dollars as Halliburton profited handsomely from the war in Iraq.
Reviewing this record — secrecy, impatience with government regulations, backroom dealings, handsome paydays — it dawned on us that Mr. Cheney is in step with the times. He has privatized the job of vice president of the United States.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

SEX, REALITY, AND THE BUSH-O-RAMUSSES

BY KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL

The Nation -- A RECENT STUDY commissioned by Congress concluded that abstinence-only programs are completely ineffective in preventing or delaying teenagers from having sexual intercourse. Nor do they lower unwanted pregnancy rates or lessen the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Given this reality, it's bad news that the federal government will waste $176 million on these programs in 2007 alone. "In short, American taxpayers appear to have paid over one billion federal dollars for programs that have no impact," said Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif), chair of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

The good news: Leaders at the state and federal level are learning how counterproductive abstinence-only programs are and are starting to take action.

Several states, including California, Maine, New Jersey, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have already rejected Title V funds, for being too restrictive. And more recently, Congressional leaders have indicated that they would allow Title V, a $50 million abstinence-only program, to expire on June 30. "Abstinence-only seems to be a colossal failure," said Rep. John Dingell, (D- MI) chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee which has jurisdiction over Title V funding.

Rep. Waxman is also considering holding hearings on the issue in the near future.

"With all we know about how to prevent teen pregnancy and reduce sexually transmitted diseases," said Rep. Diana DeGette, (D-Col.), "it is high time to redirect the millions of federal dollars that we squander every year on abstinence-only education to programs that actually work."

This post was co-written by Michael Corcoran, a former Nation intern and freelance journalist residing in Boston. www.michaelcorcoran.blogspot.com. Please send us your own ideas for "sweet victories" by emailing to nationvictories@gmail.com
Copyright © 2007 The Nation

TEXT OF INFAMOUS DOWNING ST. MEMO

THE OFFICIAL MEMO explaining the decision to invade Iraq is so damning it defies logic that Blair and Bush were able to remain in office after its publication in The Sunday Times of London May 1, 2005. That was during the last days of the UK general election campaign. The story had only limited coverage in the USA. The memo confirms that seven months before the invasion “intelligence and facts were being fixed” around the excuses of terrorism and WMD and that “the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran.” It reveals all the U.N. machinations as a sham because the invasion was going ahead regardless of how they turned out. But of course we knew all that when Bush kicked out the U.N. weapons inspectors so he could play war. The memo also points out the Americans gave little thought to the invasion’s “aftermath.”
Attendees at the July 23, 2002 top-level meeting included three members of the Cabinet (Prime Minister Blair, the Defense Secretary and the Foreign Secretary), three out of the four top people from the UK intelligence community, the head of the armed forces and four of the innermost circle of Blair's political advisors. “C” is Sir Richard Dearlove, head of the Secret Intelligence Service.

SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY
DAVID MANNING

From: Matthew RycroftDate: 23 July 2002S 195 /02
cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell
IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER'S MEETING, 23 JULY
Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.
This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.
John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam's regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. But the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime's record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
CDS said that military planners would brief CENTCOM on 1-2 August, Rumsfeld on 3 August and Bush on 4 August.
The two broad US options were:
(a) Generated Start. A slow build-up of 250,000 US troops, a short (72 hour) air campaign, then a move up to Baghdad from the south. Lead time of 90 days (30 days preparation plus 60 days deployment to Kuwait).
(b) Running Start. Use forces already in theatre (3 x 6,000), continuous air campaign, initiated by an Iraqi casus belli. Total lead time of 60 days with the air campaign beginning even earlier. A hazardous option.
The US saw the UK (and Kuwait) as essential, with basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus critical for either option. Turkey and other Gulf states were also important, but less vital. The three main options for UK involvement were:
(i) Basing in Diego Garcia and Cyprus, plus three SF squadrons.
(ii) As above, with maritime and air assets in addition.
(iii) As above, plus a land contribution of up to 40,000, perhaps with a discrete role in Northern Iraq entering from Turkey, tying down two Iraqi divisions.
The Defence Secretary said that the US had already begun "spikes of activity" to put pressure on the regime. No decisions had been taken, but he thought the most likely timing in US minds for military action to begin was January, with the timeline beginning 30 days before the US Congressional elections.
The Foreign Secretary said he would discuss this with Colin Powell this week. It seemed clear that Bush had made up his mind to take military action, even if the timing was not yet decided. But the case was thin. Saddam was not threatening his neighbours, and his WMD capability was less than that of Libya, North Korea or Iran. We should work up a plan for an ultimatum to Saddam to allow back in the UN weapons inspectors. This would also help with the legal justification for the use of force.
The Attorney-General said that the desire for regime change was not a legal base for military action. There were three possible legal bases: self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UNSC authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case. Relying on UNSCR 1205 of three years ago would be difficult. The situation might of course change.
The Prime Minister said that it would make a big difference politically and legally if Saddam refused to allow in the UN inspectors. Regime change and WMD were linked in the sense that it was the regime that was producing the WMD. There were different strategies for dealing with Libya and Iran. If the political context were right, people would support regime change. The two key issues were whether the military plan worked and whether we had the political strategy to give the military plan the space to work.
On the first, CDS said that we did not know yet if the US battleplan was workable. The military were continuing to ask lots of questions.
For instance, what were the consequences, if Saddam used WMD on day one, or if Baghdad did not collapse and urban warfighting began? You said that Saddam could also use his WMD on Kuwait. Or on Israel, added the Defence Secretary.
The Foreign Secretary thought the US would not go ahead with a military plan unless convinced that it was a winning strategy. On this, US and UK interests converged. But on the political strategy, there could be US/UK differences. Despite US resistance, we should explore discreetly the ultimatum. Saddam would continue to play hard-ball with the UN.
John Scarlett assessed that Saddam would allow the inspectors back in only when he thought the threat of military action was real.
The Defence Secretary said that if the Prime Minister wanted UK military involvement, he would need to decide this early. He cautioned that many in the US did not think it worth going down the ultimatum route. It would be important for the Prime Minister to set out the political context to Bush.
Conclusions:
(a) We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any firm decisions. CDS should tell the US military that we were considering a range of options.
(b) The Prime Minister would revert on the question of whether funds could be spent in preparation for this operation.
(c) CDS would send the Prime Minister full details of the proposed military campaign and possible UK contributions by the end of the week.
(d) The Foreign Secretary would send the Prime Minister the background on the UN inspectors, and discreetly work up the ultimatum to Saddam.
He would also send the Prime Minister advice on the positions of countries in the region especially Turkey, and of the key EU member states.
(e) John Scarlett would send the Prime Minister a full intelligence update.
(f) We must not ignore the legal issues: the Attorney-General would consider legal advice with FCO/MOD legal advisers.
(I have written separately to commission this follow-up work.)
MATTHEW RYCROFT
Rycroft was a Downing Street foreign policy aide

WELCOME BACK TO THE MISSILE RACE

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Star Wars has been quietly but steadily milking the budget since early in the Reagan Administration, and after just about 25 years, the people pushing the hardware decided they must deploy something somewhere, so our warrior president is set to install stuff around Eastern Europe, where nations are so happy to be out of the Soviet orbit they’ll embrace almost any idiotic idea advocated by its new best friends in Washington.
After empowering al-Qaeda and Iran with his bungled occupation of Iraq, the gallant prince is off to kick-start another Cold War with Moscow. Understand that this missile defense scheme won’t protect us from anything. The respected American Physical Society took a good look at the theories and accomplishments of the program and in 2003, on a purely practical basis, debunked it as a crazy boondoggle. But with physical deployment, program backers can appear to be moving forward with a workable system.
Program supporters say anyone who opposes it wants America to be defenseless, but mathematically, this is madness multiplied by madness and then squared to the power of the military-industrial complex. For every dollar spent on missile defense, it costs only a few cents on the offensive end to overcome whatever was developed on the defensive end.

We're spending $10 billion a year on this stuff now, and because of what Bush's people are setting in place, the Center for Defense Information forecasts this will rise to $18 billion by 2016.

The 2003 study found it might be possible to develop a limited system that with luck could intercept some missiles from Iran, but not those from North Korea. Meanwhile, the offensive trend is moving toward solid-fueled ICBMs which are harder to intercept during boost phase.

WHAT ABOUT CLINTON?

It would be nice to free the world of the threat of nuclear destruction, but the way to do it is to cut down the nukes, not undrwrite programs that will trigger a new missile race. The more missiles there are, the less safe we are.
This President watches blankly and dispassionately while young, broken bodies are sent home from Iraq, but gets very animated when it comes to pouring more funds into the accounts of his corporate pals, and Star Wars is just one more way to do it.

If you wanted to manufacture a president that would ruin this nation one day at a time, he’d look very much like this one. Just throwing together a cold salad in the kitchen, this guy could burn down a city. Among his barely noticed abominable acts was to unilaterally pull the U.S. out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 2002.

Is help on the way? Maybe. Billl Clinton kept Star Wars afloat for eight years, and if he and Hillary get the next turn on the Bush-Clinton teeter-totter, expect more of the same.

Welcome back to the Cold War.

ARMY POST FORCED TO ALTER MEMORIALS DUE TO RISING IRAQ DEATH TOLL

The Nation -- Because so many Fort Lewis soliders are being killed in Iraq, the Washington State army base says it will no longer hold individual memorial services. Fort Lewis will now hold one memorial a month for all dead soldiers. In May, the bloodiest month of the occupation in 2007, 19 Fort Lewis soldiers were killed --more than at any time during this war, About 10,000 of the base's troops are now in Iraq--the most since the 2003 invasion.

With this order, the base commanders appear to be signaling that they foresee bloodier, deadlier times ahead--as the "surge" takes more lives. And though they may wish to diminish the pain and grief of a hard hit community, collective memorials will also shield people from the reality of the death and destruction wrought by this war and occupation. It is also a policy that reminds of other attempts to suppress the reality of this war. This Administration, for example, has gone out of its way to prohibit evidence of dead soldiers returning home--by prohibiting photographs of coffins as they arrived back in the US. The President and Vice-President have carefully avoided attending any of the more than 3,400 funerals that are the tragic fabric of this war. It is worth remembering that it was the grief and pain at the scores of funerals they attended that moved Republican Walter Jones of North Carolina and Democrat John Murtha of Pennsylvania to oppose this war.

Every day we delay leaving Iraq costs only more American and Iraqi lives.

IMAGINE IF BUSH WERE PRESIDENT IN DECEMBER '41

DIGGING DEEPER
By Ivan G. Goldman

Iraq policy statements coming out of Bush’s manure farm are very much like what you might hear trying to collect money from a deadbeat. They always promise some future event that will allow them to make everything right if only we show patience – some check is coming from someplace. And of course anyone who disbelieves our deadbeat in the White House, we’re told, shows a terrible lack of patriotism or is just a fool who thinks we don’t have to fight terrorists.
Now we wait for General David Patraeus’ report in September. After that, policy will become clear, rational, purposeful, and on course. And if it doesn’t, there’s always another event to wait for.
Before the Patraeus report we had the Baker commission. Remember? The administration first wanted us to wait for it, then wanted us to forget it, but now Bush has revived its memory, probably because its recommendations will have something to do with the next blessed event promising to answer all our questions.
In the meantime, administration flunkies leaked what was supposed to be a bombshell of a story to The New York Times claiming troop strength may well come down to 100,000 or so next year. Gosh, isn’t that an election year?
Patraeus’ battle plan, which is already heaping more pointless casualties onto the altar of Bush’s ego (that’s a metaphor I borrowed from Bill Moyers) can’t possibly be combined with a troop reduction because it calls for establishing numerous smaller outposts and more aggressive patrols. Those troops who aren’t yanked would be even more outnumbered. It’s horrible to contemplate the result.
Meanwhile word has leaked out that years ago an exceptional mine-resistant battle vehicle was designed in Africa. But the manufacturer can make only a few of them a year, and there’s no push from Bush to rev up production even though more than half of our casualties come from mines that tear through our vehicles.

WIN OR PERISH?
In World War II FDR ordered manufacturers to stop making civilian cars and other non-essentials because the nation had to win or perish. Manufacturers poured out liberty ships, planes, artillery pieces, ammo. Designs were stepped up. Inferior tanks and planes were replaced by new ones that could go up against the best. After less than four years of fighting, the enemy was vanquished.
Bush says victory is vital, that al Qaeda will follow us home if we leave Iraq and slaughter bunches and bunches of us, but he does nothing to put the nation on a war footing, and his war of choice in Iraq passed the four-year mark long ago. If he believed what he says, he’d need to revamp manufacturing and establish a draft. Or perhaps not. When informed we were under attack in September 2001, he spent the next seven minutes reading The Pet Goat. Then he ran away, emerging three days later with a bullhorn and a load of crap. That was after spending almost an entire year ignoring terrorist threats and actions.
Had he been at the wheel in December 1941, we’d have lost the war, plain and simple. Achtung, sayanora, that’s all she wrote.
America still has FDRs around, but they no longer rise to the top of the political process and for the most part don’t even get involved with it. That’s because the system has been stunk up by the need for incredible amounts of cash. Beggars, fools, incompetents, and liars rise to the top. Not FDRs or Lincolns.
So we can all look forward to these Bush-manufactured phony events until the big one in November 2008 and hope that somehow this time we'll move up in class to a second-rater.

UNBOMB IRAQ (GUEST POEM BY TEXAS POET SUSAN BRIGHT)

Rewind reality so the gray heap
of someone’s brains rushes back into
a broken skull. Unlight the firestorm

so fragments of ash
meld back together. Attach severed arms and legs
to bodies, breathe life

back into dead children
and their parents. Repair the waste of soldiers who
are battered and die

obeying an illegal campaign.
Draw blood and bad water up from sand, purify
the water, restore

the lives of human beings caught in the human
catastrophe "shock and awe" has wrought
on the world — in our name.

Apologize.
It is a mistake to think weapons fix anything.
Justice solves human problems, not bombs.

Unbomb Iraq.
This is wrong. Americans are not monsters.
Hitler would find no fascists here. Ay!

We suffer from bad government. That’s all.
Enormous errors tangle the American will —
We think we are a free people.

We’re not.
We think we have a free press. We don’t.
Stealth corporations have usurped our constitution.

Human survival on earth depends on our being able
to control them. I startle awake, these words
on my lips —

Unbomb Iraq.
Unbomb Iraq.
Unbomb Iraq.

©Susan Bright, 2003

Award-winning poet Bright is publisher of Plain View Books. http://www.plainviewpress.net/. Her personal Website is http://earthfamilyalpha.blogspot.com 'Unbomb Iraq' is part of the collection The Layers of Our Seeing.

Doubts Grow as G.I.’s in Iraq Find Allies in Enemy Ranks (Riveting, revealing guest article from NY Times)

May 27, 2007
By MICHAEL KAMBER
NEW YORK TIMES

BAGHDAD — Staff Sgt. David Safstrom does not regret his previous tours in Iraq, not even a difficult second stint when two comrades were killed while trying to capture insurgents.

“In Mosul, in 2003, it felt like we were making the city a better place,” he said. “There was no sectarian violence, Saddam was gone, we were tracking down the bad guys. It felt awesome.”

But now on his third deployment in Iraq, he is no longer a believer in the mission. The pivotal moment came, he says, this past February when soldiers killed a man setting a roadside bomb. When they searched the bomber’s body, they found identification showing him to be a sergeant in the Iraqi Army.

“I thought, ‘What are we doing here? Why are we still here?’ ” said Sergeant Safstrom, a member of Delta Company of the First Battalion, 325th Airborne Infantry, 82nd Airborne Division. “We’re helping guys that are trying to kill us. We help them in the day. They turn around at night and try to kill us.”

His views are echoed by most of his fellow soldiers in Delta Company, renowned for its aggressiveness.

A small minority of Delta Company soldiers — the younger, more recent enlistees in particular — seem to still wholeheartedly support the war. Others are ambivalent, torn between fear of losing more friends in battle, longing for their families and a desire to complete their mission.

With few reliable surveys of soldiers’ attitudes, it is impossible to simply extrapolate from the small number of soldiers in Delta Company. But in interviews with more than a dozen soldiers over a one-week period with this 83-man unit, most said they were disillusioned by repeated deployments, by what they saw as the abysmal performance of Iraqi security forces and by a conflict that they considered a civil war, one they had no ability to stop.

They had seen shadowy militia commanders installed as Iraqi Army officers, they said, had come under increasing attack from roadside bombs — planted within sight of Iraqi Army checkpoints — and had fought against Iraqi soldiers whom they thought were their allies.

“In 2003, 2004, 100 percent of the soldiers wanted to be here, to fight this war,” said Sgt. First Class David Moore, a self-described “conservative Texas Republican” and platoon sergeant who strongly advocates an American withdrawal. “Now, 95 percent of my platoon agrees with me.”

It is not a question of loyalty, the soldiers insist. Sergeant Safstrom, for example, comes from a thoroughly military family. His mother and father have served in the armed forces, as have his three sisters, one brother and several uncles. One week after the Sept. 11 attacks, he walked into a recruiter’s office and joined the Army.

“You guys want to start a fight in my backyard, I got something for you,” he recalls thinking at the time.

But in Sergeant Safstrom’s view, the American presence is futile. “If we stayed here for 5, even 10 more years, the day we leave here these guys will go crazy,” he said. “It would go straight into a civil war. That’s how it feels, like we’re putting a Band-Aid on this country until we leave here.”

Their many deployments have added to the strain. After spending six months in Iraq, the soldiers of Delta Company had been home for only 24 hours last December when the news came. “Change your plans,” they recall being told. “We’re going back to Iraq.”

Nineteen days later, just after Christmas, Capt. Douglas Rogers and the men of Delta Company were on their way to Kadhimiya, a Shiite enclave of about 300,000. As part of the so-called surge of American troops, their primary mission was to maintain stability in the area and prepare the Iraqi Army and police to take control of the neighborhood.

“I thought it would not be long before we could just stay on our base and act as a quick-reaction force,” said the barrel-chested Captain Rogers of San Antonio. “The Iraqi security forces would step up.”

It has not worked out that way. Still, Captain Rogers says their mission in Kadhimiya has been “an amazing success.”

“We’ve captured 4 of the top 10 most-wanted guys in this area,” he said. And the streets of Kadhimiya are filled with shoppers and the stores are open, he said, a rarity in Baghdad due partly to Delta Company’s patrols.

Captain Rogers acknowledges the skepticism of many of his soldiers. “Our unit has already sent two soldiers home in a box,” he said. “My soldiers don’t see the same level of commitment from the Iraqi Army units they’re partnered with.”

Yet there is, he insists, no crisis of morale: “My guys are all professionals. I tell them to do something, they do it.” His dictum is proved on patrol, where his soldiers walk the streets for hours in the stifling heat, providing cover for one another with crisp efficiency.

On April 29, a Delta Company patrol was responding to a tip at Al Sadr mosque, a short distance from its base. The soldiers saw men in the distance erecting burning barricades, and the streets emptied out quickly. Then a militia, believed to be the Mahdi Army, which is affiliated with the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr, began firing at them from rooftops and windows.

Sgt. Kevin O’Flarity, a squad leader, jumped into his Humvee to join his fellow soldiers, racing through abandoned Iraqi Army and police checkpoints to the battle site.

He and his squad maneuvered their Humvees through alleyways and side streets, firing back at an estimated 60 insurgents during a gun battle that raged for two and a half hours. A rocket-propelled grenade glanced off Sergeant O’Flarity’s Humvee, failing to penetrate.

When the battle was over, Delta Company learned that among the enemy dead were at least two Iraqi Army soldiers that American forces had helped train and arm.

“The 29th was a watershed moment in a negative sense, because the Iraqi Army would not fight with us,” Captain Rogers said, adding, “Some actually picked up weapons and fought against us.”

The battle changed the attitude among his soldiers toward the war, he said.

“Before that fight, there were a few true believers.” Captain Rogers said. “After the 29th, I don’t think you’ll find a true believer in this unit. They’re paratroopers. There’s no question they’ll fulfill their mission. But they’re fighting now for pride in their unit, professionalism, loyalty to their fellow soldier and chain of command.”

To Sergeant O’Flarity, the Iraqi security forces are militias beholden to local leaders, not the Iraqi government. “Half of the Iraqi security forces are insurgents,” he said.

As for his views on the war, Sergeant O’Flarity said, “I don’t believe we should be here in the middle of a civil war.”

“We’ve all lost friends over here,” he said. “Most of us don’t know what we’re fighting for anymore. We’re serving our country and friends, but the only reason we go out every day is for each other.”

“I don’t want any more of my guys to get hurt or die. If it was something I felt righteous about, maybe. But for this country and this conflict, no, it’s not worth it.”

Staff Sgt. James Griffin grew up in Troy, N.C., near the Special Operations base at Fort Bragg. His dream was to be a soldier, and growing up he would skip school and volunteer to play the role of the enemy during Special Operations training exercises. When he was 17, he joined the Army.

Now 22, Sergeant Griffin is a Delta Company section leader. On the night of May 5, as he neared an Iraqi police checkpoint with a convoy of Humvees, Sergeant Griffin spotted what looked like a camouflaged cinderblock and immediately halted the convoy. His vigilance may have saved the lives of several soldiers. Under the camouflage was a huge, six-array, explosively formed penetrator — a deadly roadside bomb that cuts through the Humvees’ armor with ease.

The insurgents quickly set off the device, but the Americans were at a safe distance. An explosive ordnance disposal team arrived to check the area. As the ordnance team rolled back to base, they were attacked with a second roadside bomb near another Iraqi checkpoint. One soldier was killed and two were wounded.

No one has been able to explain why two bombs were found near Iraqi checkpoints, bombs that Iraqi soldiers and the police had either failed to notice or helped to plant.

Sergeant Griffin understands the criticism of the Iraqi forces, but he believes they, and the war effort, must be given more time.

“If we throw this problem to the side, it’s not going to fix itself,” he said. “We’ve created the Iraqi forces. We gave them Humvees and equipment. For however long they say they need us here, maybe we need to stay.”

Will some White House correspondent ask our President about the revelations made in this article? Michael Kamber risked his life to gather the material. --I.G.