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September 30, 2004

Flying Blind

As soon as we get our documents in order, we're outta here

As national elections approach in our Iraq colony, you can almost feel the electricity in the air. Not that there's much actual electricity—power service ranges from nine to 15 hours a day in most of the country, and electricity generation in Baghdad has fallen off by 20 percent in the past week, according to the latest U.S. report.

On second thought, that crackle in the atmosphere is probably gunfire. It's certainly not from the upcoming elections. As Borzou Daragahi of Beirut's Daily Star put it this morning in his dispatch from Baghdad:

With 100 days to go before elections are scheduled to be held to decide Iraq's future, no posters adorn the capital's streets, and no names are being bandied about. There have been no debates scheduled, no candidate forums, no voter education guides. Instead, Iraqi and American officials are raising serious doubts as to whether legitimate elections are possible.

Daragahi rightly noted that under Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, politics in Iraq "became a dark and secretive enterprise rather than a forum for solving common problems."

Thank God that's not the situation here in the U.S. of A., I say, as I wait impatiently for the release of records of deliberations by Dick Cheney's energy task force, of the White House–censored 28 pages from the congressional report on Saudi Arabia's connection to 9-11, of a full account of what Cheney and Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia talked about while they were killing ducks this past January, and of the U.S. military's own reports on what kind of Abu Ghraib–like behavior has taken place in Guantánamo Bay's military prisons. Seymour Hersh, who's been kicking the Bush regime's ass in The New Yorker and elsewhere, predicted on The Daily Show last night that "when we learn all there is to learn" about Guantánamo Bay, "we're going to be mightily ashamed. … It's a blot on all of us." We already have a 115-page report from three former prisoners, plus other allegations, including a claim from former prisoner Tareq Dergoul that he was "beaten like a beast" and had his head shoved down a toilet—while a video camera recorded it.

See this Washington Post story on Major General Geoffrey D. Miller, the former Colonel Klink of Camp X-Ray. He's the guy who told Abu Ghraib officials that guards should be "actively engaged" in extracting information, an order that got a "thumbs up" from Lynndie England.

But for those unarmed Iraqis who aren't in jail, shooting at our troops, or cowering in the rubble of their homes and who want to get away from all the pre-election excitement, there's good news from Baghdad: Iraqi Airways resumed international flights this month, after being grounded for 14 years by war and sanctions and then more war.

The airine will fly to Syria and Jordan twice a week and has already sold "dozens of tickets," officials said. It's a little pricey, though. Like if you want a return flight to Baghdad from Amman, Jordan? It'll cost you $750, says CNN, compared with $40 for the same trip by road. If you're driving, be sure to load your rifle before you go.

You may have to drive anyway. A U.S. Department of Commerce report says that only one plane in the Iraqi Airways fleet is operational.

Posted by wharkavy at 3:52 PM

A Lack of National Debate

Referee the steel-cage death match between the Israelis and Palestinians, and then we'll talk

The latest mass-media hysteria promoted by hack journalists is that the election is so close that the presidential debates are make-or-break. If that's the case—if people are going to make up their minds based on a TV miniseries—we're broken. A better idea would be to read up on what Tony Cordesman has to say about the Middle East. More on him in a minute. But keep one point in mind when you watch the first Bush-Kerry TV show tonight: It's not a debate.

One of the most concise statements of this view comes from Kathy Gill, a senior lecturer in the University of Washington's Department of Communication. Courtesy of the basic site About.com comes her assessment:

The 2004 presidential debates are misnamed: Each candidate "answers" a question in a two-minute soundbite; this is not "debating" an issue, as any high school debate team member can attest. It is a made-for-TV battle of spin, and the candidate wins who has the best marketing people on staff (who develop memorable "bites" on each issue).

Now about this Cordesman fellow. You may have seen him on ABC News as a military analyst or run across his name in one of Paul Krugman's op-ed pieces in The New York Times. In a September 24 column, "Let's Get Real," re-posted here, Krugman wrote:

In an analysis titled Inexcusable Failure, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies details how the U.S. "failed to treat the Iraqis as partners in the counter-insurgency effort." U.S. officials, he declares, are "guilty of a gross military, administrative and moral failure."

A former adviser to Senator John McCain, Cordesman is often that blunt. Read Inexcusable Failure for yourself. He's an antidote to the neocon job that's been foisted upon the American people.

Cordesman is also funny, at least in a mordant way. Back in 1996, in a paper ominously titled Terrorism and the Threat From Weapons of Mass Destruction in the Middle East, he warned about "totalitarian solutionists" in the West who would be too heavy-handed in responding to terrorism. While acknowledging that "even paranoids face real terrorist threats," he wrote:

This terrorizing approach to terrorism may well have begun with Aesop's fable about the "boy who cried wolf"—the boy being the world's first counterterrorist. The eventual triumph of the wolf may also have led to the first counterterrorism conspiracy theorist. There are equally strong indications that many writers about terrorism trace their intellectual roots to the story of Chicken Little, the first counterterrorism expert to turn a minor incident into an announcement that the sky was falling.

Today, Cordesman's still plugging away at the centrist CSIS. This is a guy who's been going to Iraq for 30 years, and he's written some scary shit about Saddam Hussein's arsenal. But in light of what he's recently written and said about the Middle East, he's probably got a fatwa on him from fanatics of all three of the religions battling for land over there.

Earlier this month, at the 13th Annual Arab-U.S. Policymakers Conference in D.C. (you're right; it was hardly covered at all), Cordesman did what only fanatics, fundamentalists, and evangelicals usually do: He mixed religion with politics. But in his case, he took extremists of all stripes to task. In a speech titled "Beyond Anger and Counterterrorism: A New Grand Strategy for U.S. and Arab Relations," he said:

The actions of Osama bin Laden and other Islamic extremists have exposed a fundamental failure to bridge the ideological and cultural gaps between Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. The end result is a common threat in forms of Islamic extremism that cannot tolerate other interpretations of Islam, much less Judaism and Christianity.

It is a threat in forms of Christianity that see all non-Christians as damned, and Jews simply as a convenient mechanism to trigger the Second Coming.

It is a threat in Israeli extremist statements that effectively dehumanize Palestinians and reject the legitimacy of Islam. It is a threat in the form of statements in the Arab world that go from anger against Israel's political and military actions to attacks on all Jews and Judaism.

Governments, said Cordesman, "have reacted largely by treating the symptoms and not the disease." He added:

Counterterrorism is essential to deal with the most obvious and damaging symptoms, but it cannot deal with the underlying causes. Military force is sometimes necessary. However, it is now all too clear in Iraq that it can create as many—or more—problems than it solves.

His message to everybody: Take off the polarizing lenses and stop blustering.

Citing a major August poll taken in predominantly Muslim countries by the Pew Research Center, Cordesman noted that "anger toward the United States remains pervasive," that "Osama bin Laden is viewed favorably by large percentages in Pakistan (65%), Jordan (55%) and Morocco (45%)," and that even in Turkey, "where bin Laden is highly unpopular, as many as 31% say that suicide attacks against Americans and other Westerners" are considered justifiable. Cordesman continued:

There are many other surveys that deliver the same message, just as there are many surveys of U.S. and Western opinion that reflect anger against terrorism, and hostility toward Islam and the Arab world.

U.S. and Arab relations are where they are today for many reasons, but one of them is that the Western and Islamic worlds have previously defined "tolerance" in terms of mutual ignorance, and in terms of governmental indifference at the ideological, political, and cultural level.

Empty U.S. calls for instant, region-wide democracy and political reform are producing a dangerous counterreaction in much of the Arab world. A Western focus on counterterrorism—without a balancing focus on creating bridges between the West and Middle East—is often breeding extremism rather than defeating it.

Scholars like Columbia prof Mahmoud Mamdani, who straddles both the West and the "developing world," often take such global, non-jingoistic outlooks. (See my short piece on Mamdani.) This kind of stuff usually doesn't emanate from Western military analysts. Not that Cordesman would necessarily agree with Mamdani about that much. But Cordesman warned the Arab-U.S. policymakers of the long-term consequences of the current mentality of Crusader vs. Saracen:

Unlike today's crises and conflicts, these forces will play out over decades. They cannot be dealt with simply by attacking today's terrorists and extremists; they cannot be dealt with by pretending religion is not an issue, and that tolerance can be based on indifference or ignorance. …

History has shown the cost if governments do not act or are passive in dealing with challenges this severe: Two thousand years of mindless anti-Semitism in the West culminated in the Holocaust. A heritage of racism in the United States only began to be openly and frankly addressed once the Supreme Court took judicial action nearly a century after the Civil War. Conflicts in Bosnia and Kosovo took the form of ethnic cleansing based on age-old and half-forgotten divisions between Christians and Muslims.

Among his solutions is one that's surely at odds with the aims of the current neocon zealots infesting the Pentagon, White House, and Department of Justice:

A … comprehensive review is needed of counterterrorism policies that looks beyond a narrow focus on defeating terrorists and seeks to ensure that necessary action to defeat terrorism does not create unnecessary anger and hostility, detain or arrest the innocent, or fail to compensate those who are unfairly arrested. Western policies toward immigration must emphasize tolerance and equality for Arab and Islamic immigrants, not just economic need and security.

Finally, but actually as soon as possible, there has to be some sort of movement toward settlement of the Palestinian-Israeli death dance. He hurls a pox on both their houses, saying, "There is absolutely nothing to be gained from waiting for two inadequate governments to bludgeon each other into peace." This is tricky, he says, because "a common solution cannot be imposed by force, and the U.S. and Arab world will never agree on all the details of a final settlement."

But he contends that Western governments must join with the Arab world to step into that morass to "define a final settlement." Word to the Palestinians: "Reject terrorism." Word to the Israelis: "Roll back settlements in both the Gaza and the West Bank."

Richard Clarke has already pointed out the incompetence and ignorance of the pre–9-11 early daze of the Bush administration. Well, Cordesman did his part too, in trying to warn Congress about "Iraq and America's Foreign Policy Crisis in the Middle East." In Cordesman's testimony on March 1, 2001, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he blasted the Clinton administration for its Middle East failures, but he laid out a rational policy, not the one that Crusader Bush has followed. No peacenik, Cordesman was all for "military containment" of Saddam and "long-term covert operations" against him, even the threat of "decisive force." But everyone in D.C. knew the Bush administration's neocons were already gung ho about Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress as future "liberators" of Iraq, and Cordesman told the senators:

The Bush Administration threatens to repeat the mistakes of the Clinton administration and Congress, and go on backing weak and unpopular elements of the Iraqi opposition like the Iraqi National Congress. These movements have no meaningful support from any friendly government in the region, and they have no military potential beyond dragging the U.S. into a "Bay of Kuwait" or "Bay of Kurdistan" disaster.

The Turks fear them as a way of dividing Iraq and creating a Kurdistan, and the Arabs fear them as a way of bringing Iraq under Shiite control and/or Iranian influence. Worse, they are no substitute for a major covert effort to overthrow Saddam from within, and overt U.S. funding of such movements tends to label the Iraqi opposition as U.S.-sponsored traitors. We need to understand that containing Iraq is far more important than legislating the funding of a forlorn hope.

Of course, Cordesman had no way of knowing that planes would smack into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and that the Bush regime would use that as an excuse to invade Iraq. But he had an idea that if they pinned their hopes on schnooks like Chalabi, they would fuck it up.

Posted by wharkavy at 3:45 PM

September 29, 2004

Rave Review of Iraq 'Reconstruction'

That's 'rave' as in 'rant'

The odds are against finding a blogger who does more than screech, but I'll give it to a chap named Lounsbury, whose June posting on Live Journal screeches to the tune of journalistic dispatches, in a sort of transmogrified call-and-response style that John Kerry should take as gospel on the eve of his first debate with George W. Bush.

Lounsbury's Live Journal profile identifies him as being a "Middle East/North Africa specialist in asset management and risk capital." (Further research indicates that he may currently live in Jordan.)

In any case, he zooms in on U.S. pasha Jerry Bremer's disastrous Coalition Provisional Authority "reconstruction" of Iraq, parsing a couple of Washington Post stories to discuss just the competency of what we're doing over there. Let's focus on Lounsbury's back talk to the info in Rajiv Chandrasekaran's "Mistakes Loom Large as Handover Nears," published June 20. Like this passage:

"We blatantly failed to get it right," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution who served as an adviser to the occupation authority. "When you look at the record, it's impossible to escape the conclusion that we squandered an unprecedented opportunity."

Lounsbury's riff:

Squandered is bloody right. Nothing had to be this bad. Not even after the looting, but again, the current [U.S.] administration's blind mendacity, its extreme preference for sycophants over skilled and pragmatic operators is deadly. … Opposition to this administration is a duty for anyone who cares about competency. I am not pleased with the concept of a Kerry White House, but I would rather have the occasion to vote out a mediocre Kerry than suffer through the disasters these incompetent fools are wreaking out of pure blind hubris.

Then Lounsbury comes upon this sentence:

U.S. reconstruction specialists commonly complain of ungrateful Iraqis.

Call Father Karras! Lounsbury's head is spinning! He writes:

What the fuck these idiots think the Iraqis should be grateful for I don't know, but certainly merely toppling a dictator is not enough. The motherfuckers in Iraq know bloody well that toppling dictators does not make the fucking pie in the end, so no reason to congratulate the chef for simply having bought the motherfucking ingredients, he's gotta fucking make the pie in order [for us] to fucking congratulate him. Mindless idiots, these stupid fucking American "reconstruction" idiots in the CPA, full of their bloated farts of empty pompous "liberation" posturing.

Before Lounsbury's head explodes all over our keyboards, he stumbles on this paragraph:

In many ways, the occupation appears to have transformed the occupier more than the occupied. Iraqis continue to endure blackouts, lengthy gas lines, rampant unemployment, and the uncertain political future that began when U.S. tanks rolled into Baghdad. But American officials who once roamed the country to share their sense of mission with Iraqis now face such mortal danger that they are largely confined to compounds surrounded by concrete walls topped with razor wire. Iraqis who come to meet them must show two forms of identification and be searched three times.

To which Lounsbury calmly notes:

I rather think that says all there really needs to be said about this "liberation."

Posted by wharkavy at 5:22 PM

Topical Storm Forecast

Thursday's debate: Mostly mild, with heavy gunfire halfway around the planet In a futile gesture, thousands of Americans are apparently sending in questions they want asked during tomorrow night's first Bush-Kerry debate. The questions are a project of MediaChannel.org, and you can fill out some right now if you want.

The Commission on Presidential Debates, however, has battened down the hatches: It's trying to ensure that nothing comes up that's more blustery than, say, the on-air personality of Weather Channel anchor Marshall Seese.

See Monday's Bush Beat for an analysis of the sluggish system currently stalled over America.

The updated forecast for Thursday night's viewers: Calm early, with irritation expected to steadily increase. Put on your hip boots; the shit's going to get deep.

As for the questions? Softball-sized. Oh, and the word "legacy" will be used by somebody.

Posted by wharkavy at 5:22 PM

How Much is a Dead Iraqi Worth?

We may not pay now, but we'll pay

Sounds like we need to import some of that good ol' American "tort reform" to Iraq. Mohammed Ridha al-Jashami, the governor of Wasit province, in northern Iraq, has refused to accept compensation offered by the U.S. occupation forces after residents were killed and houses were pulverized.

"Jashami said the amounts don't match the extensive damage and losses suffered in poor neighborhoods," Al-Mutamar, the daily paper of the ungrateful Iraqi National Congress, wrote. The INC, you'll recall, was set up by neocons and funded by U.S. taxpayers so that Ahmed Chalabi could return to Iraq to the sound of one hand clapping and then be disowned by us.

How much dough are we talking about, anyway? The U.S. "allocated only $1,500 for each martyr," the paper said, "and nothing to others whose houses were destroyed." The guv has asked for $15,000 for each person killed and $10,000 for others "adversely affected by the fighting."

Now they're probably thinking of lawsuits. (Check out Corp Reform's page on tort reform. But the good news for the Bush regime is that we don't believe in the International Criminal Court.)

And here the U.S. of A. is already spending about $4 billion a month in Iraq. And we're going to be spending $1 billion a year just to maintain our beautiful new embassy in Baghdad, and it's going to have a full-time psychiatrist for in-house counseling and drugs for our own people.

I mean, what do these Iraqis want from us?

Maybe the Bush regime ought to dispatch campaign prop Rudy Giuliani to Iraq to emphasize that, after all, none of the dead Iraqi civilians in Wasit were altar boys. It is believed that not a single one of the 13,000 to 15,000 dead Iraqi civilians, practically all of whom were Muslims, was in fact an altar boy, unlike Patrick Dorismond.

Go to Iraqi Press Monitor and click on September 29 to see an excerpt of the Al-Mutamar story. While you're there, look at the "cartoon of the day," which carries this explanation, courtesy of the dedicated people at the Institute for War & Peace Reporting:

A number of small people are carrying banners proclaiming their "rights," but a much larger U.S. soldier tosses them into a waste basket marked "Terrorism." The cartoon suggests that the Americans label countries that ask for their rights as terrorist, especially powerless countries.

So ungrateful of the INC, which the CIA financed and Judith Miller of The New York Times egged on.

Posted by wharkavy at 4:36 PM

Harrumph Roast

You say, 'Rush Limbaugh,' and I think, 'Winston Churchill'

I don't know about you, but I can't wait until this stupid election is over so I can go out to California on November 19 to watch Rush Limbaugh receive the Statesmanship Award at the Claremont Institute's annual Winston Churchill Dinner.

That may be the only time I'll ever write the words "Rush Limbaugh" and "Winston Churchill" in the same sentence. (Damn, I did it again.)

Limbaugh was supposed to get the award last year, but he had just gotten out of drug rehab and had to cancel. So Claremont, a severely right-wing think tank that features Pat Sajak on its board, took a gamble and brought in another addict, Bill Bennett, the "Bookie of Virtue" guy, to sub for him.

Wallow in this with me, won't you? Go to Anecdotage.com's Limbaugh page for Mr. Microphone's pre-drug-scandal comments on druggies:

"If people are violating the law by doing drugs," rabid Republican radio host Rush Limbaugh declared in 1995, "they ought to be accused and they ought to be convicted and they ought to be sent up."

"I actually think that we've gone soft on punishment in this country," he remarked on another occasion.

Then he was unmasked by The National Enquirer as addicted to prescription pain-killing drugs that, under federal law, are no different from cocaine. As Rick Hertzberg wrote in The New Yorker last October:

The suggestion that he became addicted to them under a doctor's care is almost certainly false. So is the suggestion that he wasn't taking them "recreationally"—i.e., to get high. The prescribed dose of Oxycontin, one tablet every twelve hours, is usually sufficient to relieve severe pain. The Enquirer has Limbaugh purchasing nearly twelve thousand during a four-month period in 2001—enough to soothe his back troubles for sixteen years.

Limbaugh deserves compassion no less (and no more) than any other drug addict. It would be a travesty of justice to lock him up for ingesting chemicals, an activity whose only victim, if any, has been himself. But the 450,000 Americans already in jail for breaking the drug laws also represent a failure of justice, and an even bigger failure of policy. (The United States imprisons more people for drug violations than the European Union imprisons for all causes combined, and the E.U.'s population exceeds the U.S.'s by a hundred million.)

At least Claremont was consistent in picking Bennett to fill in last year. Joshua Green's "Bookie of Virtue" story in the June 2003 Washington Monthly (see the link above) noted:

As drug czar under George H.W. Bush, he applied a get-tough approach to drug use, arguing that individuals have a moral responsibility to own up to their addiction. … Few vices have escaped Bennett's withering scorn. He has opined on everything from drinking to "homosexual unions" to The Ricki Lake Show to wife-swapping. There is one, however, that has largely escaped Bennett's wrath: gambling. … On July 12 of [2002], for instance, Bennett lost $340,000 at Caesar's Boardwalk Regency in Atlantic City. And just three weeks ago, on March 29 and 30, [2003], he lost more than $500,000 at the Bellagio in Las Vegas. "There's a term in the trade for this kind of gambler," says a casino source who has witnessed Bennett at the high-limit slots in the wee hours. "We call them losers."

Spin the wheel yourself and go to Strange Cosmos to read Claremont board member Pat Sajak's 2002 speech about Hollywood to the students of Michigan's strange little Hillsdale College. He says Hollywood is "clueless." You might want to take a cue from Dick Cheney and say to Sajak, "Buy a vowel, but first, why don't you go fck yourself."

Sajak really did deliver the speech about Hollywood. But if you want to step into a parallel universe, check out George W. Bush's appointment of Bennett as U.S. Slots Czar on the Bizarro World site whitehouse.org:

Bush told him, "I have some complimentary cocktail coupons and a free upgrade to the Lincoln bedroom to make you feel right at home, sir."

Caution: Enter that alternate reality at your own peril. It's no Willoughby. And when you return, you'll be faced with even more bullshit. Just yesterday, in a typical election-eve ploy by our incongruous lawmakers, Capitol Hill roasted Hollywood for too much sex and violence. A Los Angeles Times account, re-posted here by the San Francisco Chronicle, absurdly led with this: "Reacting to growing public concerns about sex and violence in the media…."

Yeah, right. Heard about the sex and violence in Iraqi prisons and streets lately?

The leader of this latest crusade is Kansas senator Sam Brownback, the 2000 Distinguished Christian Statesman, an honor bestowed by Fort Lauderdale preacher D. James Kennedy's powerful D.C. outlet, the Center for Christian Statesmanship, which evangelizes inside government buildings.

Previous winners of this award include John Ashcroft—read my piece "The Gospel According to the A.G." from April 2001, in which Ashcroft, the 1996 Distinguished Christian Statesman, was quoted as saying that the government "gives only half a gift when it doesn't give the spirit of Christ." I wrote that story when Ashcroft was just a threatening religious crank in a new and bumbling Bush administration. That was before 9-11 gave him the Great Commission to sweep us off our feet and into detention.

Face it: We've just got too many of these statesmen running around.

Posted by wharkavy at 4:36 PM

September 27, 2004

Arguing the Debates

Bush will be on guard (for a change), and Kerry will be playing catch-up (as usual)

I already see a problem with the Kerry-Bush debates, which begin this Thursday between the two not-ready-for-prime-time players: Page four of the "Memorandum of Understanding" between the candidates and the Commission on Presidential Debates specifically forbids "props." How's Bush even going to get past the security guards?

It doesn't matter that these two master debaters will be having more of a circle jerk than a real argument—critics like Open Debates point out that follow-up questions are restricted, for instance—or that the viewership for such events has declined since the '60s. (Bill Moyers covered some of this territory on his PBS show Now—thanks to colleague Dan Adkison for the tip.) Pundits keep saying that the debates will be crucial. Considering that so much of TV is "reality," that makes perverse sense.

And like those carefully managed "reality shows," these debates have a host of TV-only rules guaranteed to blandify everything, like this one: "The candidates may not ask each other direct questions, but may ask rhetorical questions." As for questions from the audience, which will be allowed on October 8, the moderator "shall develop, and describe to the campaigns, a method for selecting questions at random," but they can't be "inappropriate." So the moderators are under the thumb of this stultified process, too.

The October 8 debate is officially described in the memorandum as a "town hall." But the strict rules say that the "live audience" of 100 to 150 people are to be only those "who describe themselves as likely voters who are 'soft' Bush supporters or 'soft' Kerry supporters as to their 2004 presidential vote." One more thing:

The moderator shall ensure that an equal number of "soft" Bush supporters and "soft" Kerry supporters pose questions to the candidates.

Look for some hard questions. And the Gallup pollsters will pick the audience—after first clearing their methods with the two campaigns.

Ought to be exciting, huh? As for the first debate, this Thursday evening at 9, the scheduled competition looks more interesting: "Origins," on Nova, examines how life begins; CSI, on CBS, examines how life ends.

Posted by wharkavy at 12:46 PM

Webtapping Alert

Ashcroft prays your indulgence while he seeks to control the Internet

Continuing his relentless crusade against the forces of evil, Attorney General John Ashcroft is trying to give cops an easy, built-in system to spy on practically all Internet communications.

As if we weren't all busy enough, the public comment period on this sweeping, draconian plan opened September 23 and closes November 8—as if the Federal Communications Commission has much sympathy for any objections to it.

The plan is to extend the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which orders that U.S. telephone networks put surveillance back doors in their networks, to Web-based phone service (the Voice Over Internet Protocol) and the rest of the Internet.

The FCC voted unanimously in favor of the plan last month, the British computer journal The Register notes, quoting FCC Chairman Michael Powell as saying, "Our support for law enforcement is unwavering. It is our goal in this proceeding to ensure that law enforcement agencies have all of the electronic surveillance capabilities that CALEA authorizes to combat crime and terrorism and support homeland security."

Basically, all the FCC wants to hear from the rest of us is how to implement this Internet snooping, which will be run by the FBI.

Privacy groups are very public in their outrage. "Instead of making the Internet look like the telephone system of the past," said the Center for Democracy and Technology's Jim Dempsey, "the FBI and other law enforcement agencies need to acquire in-house capabilities to analyze digital communications. They should use the Internet, not try to control it."

Dempsey's energetic group says this is "one of the gravest threats in years" to the Internet.

As the equally hard-working Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) notes, Congress specifically excluded e-mails and Internet access from the bill when it was passed in 1994. Now the FCC wants to bypass Congress for authority to broaden CALEA to include the Web. (Eavesdrop on wiretapping issues at this EPIC site.)

What do you expect from these second-generation schnooks? The prime mover on this in Congress is John Sununu, whose daddy was George Bush Sr.'s chief of staff. The FCC chairman, Michael Powell, is the scarily arch-conservative son of George Bush Jr.'s secretary of state.

As for Ashcroft, well, his daddy was a preacher, but considering his track record, especially his penchant for "Godly reformation" and his inability to control his own radical bad self from, say, sweeping ordinary Muslims off the streets and detaining them like so much rubbish for as long as he likes, his political daddy seems to be Oliver Cromwell.

Posted by wharkavy at 12:46 PM

September 24, 2004

Hard Decisions in Iraq, U.S.

Attention, Pentagon men: Are you having trouble maintaining your elections?

Man, the pressure on us Americans is getting unbearable. Imperialism is hard work. I mean, we've got our own elections coming up in a few weeks, but the rest of the world just won't leave us alone. Like Jonathan Street, a Bush Beat reader in Buenos Aires, who writes:

Do you have any idea who in the fuck the Iraqis are supposed to vote for come January? Allawi: yes/no, or what? Who are the candidates in this deal, if any? I would love some help in trying to understand this magic democracy that is supposed to have appeared in the last year. According to Rumsfeld, the elections will go ahead in the parts of the country that are secure, but I didn't know that American soldiers in the Green Zone were allowed to vote.

Well, I'm pretty sure that American soldiers will be too busy either killing or getting killed to be able to go to the polls in Iraq.

As for Iraq's prime minister, Ayad Allawi, well, the Bush regime just paraded him before Congress yesterday as a prop for the U.S. elections, and he won Best in Show. The New York Times ran a front-page picture of him actually exchanging kisses with members of Congress. The Washington Post's headline writers described him as "Iraq's Dynamo," a guy with a "can-do aura," but the story itself, by Lynne Duke, was considerably more shrewd.

Gee, Allawi is so kissy-face with Bush and Congress, I wonder how the Iraqis feel about him? (You'll find out if you keep reading.)

To start, why don't we see what Iraqi newspapers have to say about their upcoming election. If they're like U.S. papers, they'll be full of campaign bullshit. I'm an American, so I don't speak that there Iraqese. I'll have to rely on the Institute for War & Peace Reporting's Iraq Press Monitor. Let's see . . . kidnappings . . . attacks on mosques . . . ah, here's an election story. The daily Al-Sabah's September 12 editorial says:

I hope that members of the interim National Assembly work on the basis that they hold their posts temporarily until January 31. I also hope they remember they are entrusted with keeping the country's election schedule on track. They should not make the possibility of their own electoral victory or loss the basis on which to shape their stands. The government and all other political powers are responsible for the political process, but the National Assembly's share of responsibility is the largest.

But who the hell is running for president or whatever?! It doesn't say. The U.S. installed former CIA stooge Allawi as the interim prime minister. He's supposed to guide Iraq through these January elections, which will set up a "transitional" government, which will then, according to this BBC overview, "draw up a new constitution for the holding of full elections by the end of 2005."

A sizable number of Iraqis want a "strongman" to stabilize the country before the January elections are even held, according to polling by Oxford Research International and the BBC.

So that would be Allawi, right? Wrong. The meticulous June 2004 Oxford/BBC poll asked Iraqis, "Which national leader in Iraq, if any, do you trust the most?" Only 14 persons got more than 0.2 percent, and Allawi wasn't one of them. Muqtada al-Sadr, however, was fourth, and a guy named Saddam Hussein was 10th. Hussein dug himself into a little hole last year and is currently unavailable. As for Muqtada, well, there's a slight problem. One of American pasha L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer's last acts before "turning over" Iraq to the puppet Allawi regime was to ban Muqtada from the elections—even if Muqtada immediately disbanded his militia.

Bremer's reign was disastrous anyway. See, he appointed U.S. stooge Ahmed Chalabi's son, Salem Chalabi, as head of the tribunal trying Saddam Hussein. Salem Chalabi, however, is now suspected of assassination plots against officials in the new Iraq finance ministry. Previously, Salem Chalabi, a former Princetonian and Yalie, set up a consulting business to help broker oil deals in the "new" Iraq. And the consulting business was using the offices of the international law firm Zell Goldberg, whose senior partner is Marc Zell, a fervent West Bank settler who also is head of the Israel chapter of Republicans Abroad, which is frantically getting out the expatriate vote worldwide to re-elect the Bush regime.

If you don't believe me, read this fascinating account by Judy Lash Balint in the September 14 installment of her Jerusalem Diaries about a campaign appearance by Zell on behalf of Bush in Israel and the importance of overseas votes for the U.S. presidential race.

Zell's former law partner is Doug Feith (the two of them lobbied on behalf of defense contractors). Feith is the prominent Pentagon neocon who wants to overthrow Iran next, but Dick Cheney's Halliburton is still doing business with Iran even though that apparent violation of U.S. sanctions is under investigation, and one of Feith's aides, Larry Franklin, is also under investigation after being accused of spying for Israel by leaking Pentagon memos on Iran, so Feith has to concentrate on Iraq, but it's hard to concentrate because he takes kids from his son's private school in D.C. on a tour of the Pentagon (and Rumsfeld's private office) on the very day the Abu Ghraib scandal is breaking, and everyone wants to talk to Feith because he set the policy on handling prisoners in Iraq, but Feith had already banned discussion of Abu Ghraib even within the Pentagon, but the school kids he'll take to the Pentagon because Feith used to be president of the school, which got money from Bush supporter Joe Allbritton, who was at the time (until this summer, in fact) a bank partner of Dubya's uncle Jonathan Bush and whose Allbritton-owned Riggs National Bank sheltered oil money from Equatorial Guinea dictator Teodoro Obiang, whose brother tortured prisoners with stinging ants and bought a house in Virginia after Allbritton's bank called him a "valued customer," but that house wasn't as nice as the mansion Obiang himself bought in Maryland—wait, this is getting out of hand. I told you imperialism is hard work. It's complicated too.

We'll get back to Allawi, I promise. But one of the most entertaining recent stories about Zell, Feith, Bremer, the Chalabis, Iraq, Israel, and U.S. defense contractors—whew!—is this Haaretz piece, "Theater of the Absurd," by Zvi Bar'el.

Absurd is the word for Bremer's reign of error in Iraq. He shut down Muqtada al-Sadr's newspaper in April, an act that did nothing but inflame a bad situation. As for Bremer's last stupid act regarding Muqtada—banning him from holding office even if he disbanded his huge militia—see this Guardian story.

Bremer banned all members of militias from running for office. The problem is, Iraq is nothing but militias these days.

Well, then, whom do the Iraqis distrust the most? Back to the Oxford/BBC poll for that answer. And that would be Ahmed Chalabi, the runaway leader in more ways than one. Of the Iraqis who mentioned someone whom they distrust, he got 42.1 percent of the vote, far outdistancing second-place finisher Saddam Hussein.

Now think about it for a moment. Ahmed Chalabi is the former CIA stooge who was used by the Bush regime to justify our unjust invasion of Iraq. He's the guy whose lying prattle was the source for New York Times reporter Judith Miller's WMD scare stories that helped convince many Americans to support the Iraq invasion. Even the U.S. government has finally disowned him—except for a hard core of neocons.

The Bush regime and Congress financed this guy, and you American taxpayers footed the bill. Isn't he an issue in our elections as well?

Oh, I forgot. We're supposed to be talking about Iraq's elections. What about Ayad Allawi? We've already said that he didn't even appear on the list of leaders whom Iraqis trust. Of the leaders they distrust, he finished a strong sixth.

Posted by wharkavy at 2:30 PM

September 23, 2004

Journos as Pols

Hey, reporters, go to Kazakhstan and run for office (or maybe get murdered)

American journalists who want to stop whining and start running things themselves—not me; I want to continue whining—should head to Kazakhstan, the Central Asian "republic" whose violations of human rights and civil rights are easy to swallow if, like the Bush-Cheney regime, you wash everything down with oil.

Last Sunday's parliamentary vote in Kazakhstan was judged farcical by Western observers, as we noted Monday. The Organization for Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) had 300 observers, from 33 countries, on hand, but many were apparently barred by Kazakh officials from observing the polling, according to stories filed by Eduard Poletaev of the Institute for War & Peace Reporting. OSCE's official verdict? "The parliamentary elections that were held on September 19 did not match the standards of the OSCE and Council of Europe."

The Council of Europe's Tana de Zulueta, an Italian pol, noted that "the seemingly politically motivated convictions of two prominent opposition leaders and lack of political balance in the composition of election commissions were worrisome, as well as evident media bias in favour of the pro-presidential parties."

Final results won't be revealed until September 25, but dictator Nazarbayev's Otan (Fatherland) Party claims to have dominated the balloting, with a centrist party finished a distant second and a party headed by Nazarbayev's daughter, Dariga, finishing third.

The election campaign was itself pretty comical too. In the scramble by opposition political parties—the ones not shut down by Nazarbayev—to field well-known candidates, some of them recruited journalists to run for Parliament. That prompted other parties to do the same. As of mid August almost 50 journos and other media figures were running, either in Nazarbayev's party, his stooges' parties, the opposition parties, or independently. That's also according to the IWPR's Poletaev.

Of course, some opposition journalists were simply locked up—one of them was charged with rape, which many observers said was simply a trumped-up excuse to get him out of the way. And opposition politicians were jailed too. It's an old story in Kazakhstan. And it's in a 2002 report by the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review, posted here by Internews. The report recounts how the 25-year-old daughter of an opposition journalist died of injuries she suffered in police custody. Another journalist, TV anchor Artur Platonov, was brutally beaten to a pulp by three ex-cops in an incident that outside observers agreed was in retaliation for his public-affairs program. In August 2002, barely seven months after Nazarbayev visited D.C. as an honored guest of the White House and posed with Bush for photo-ops, yet another journalist/activist in Kazakhstan was nearly killed for criticizing the dictator. Here's how Online Journalism Review described the incident:

On August 28, [2002,] Sergei Duvanov, online commentator and editor in chief of a human rights bulletin published by the nongovernmental organization Kazakhstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law, was beaten unconscious by three unknown assailants as he returned to his Almaty home in the evening. This was no petty mugging: Duvanov's attackers left his keys, wallet and mobile phone untouched, telling their victim, "You know what this is for—next time we'll cripple you."

The 49-year-old Duvanov had already fallen afoul of the authorities for his online work and is currently being prosecuted for "harming the honor and dignity" of Nazarbayev in his May 6 article "Silence of the Lambs" on kub.kz.

Things are different, of course, if you're interested in enriching Nazarbayev.

Back in '99, Dick Cheney was an honored member of the dictator's Oil Advisory Board, and New York business consultant James Giffen was Nazarbayev's official "counselor to the president." Now Giffen is the central figure in the Kazakhgate scandal and is scheduled to go on trial in January on charges of money laundering and other corruption involving $78 million from big oil companies that wound up stashed in Switzerland, part of it in an account controlled by Nazarbayev. Cheney? Well, you know what he's doing these days. Anyway, back in '99, Nazarbayev allowed only one opposition party: the Republican People's Party, headed by former prime minister Akejan Kazhegeldin. But the ex-PM's slogan was "Kazakhstan Without Nazarbayev," and on the eve of the election, his party was bounced from the ballot. David, Chet, Walter, Dan, Peter, Tom? Let's call that race early: It looks like Nazarbayev in a landslide.

This time around, the opposition parties toned it down, hoping to stay on the ballot. But toning it down made them all sound the same. So they needed well-known figures to run. Hence the journalists.

"The opposition is not full of radical slogans at these elections, and several pro-government parties are advancing democratic initiatives themselves," Andrei Chebotaryov, coordinator of the Kazakh National Research Institute, told IWPR before the voting. "In these conditions, to work effectively with the masses, it is necessary to draw journalists into politics."

That doesn't seem to have worked too well for CBS in our elections. Maybe Rather can afford a summer home on the Central Asian steppes so he can stay involved in electoral politics after his imminent retirement.

Posted by wharkavy at 3:42 PM

Dear Bush Beat . . .

You're a moron . . . you're nuts . . . you're a nut case . . . Chechnya is nuts

Robert Hicks of Linden, Virginia, writes:

The fact that the rest of the world wants Bush out is the best reason to keep him in.

Thank you for reading.

---

Jan Mider writes:

We are America, and WE vote for our leaders. We do not, by any means, have to see what the rest of the world thinks we should do. If we thought like this in the past, we would have English or German accents.

Thank you for reading, Fräulein Mider.

---

Mike Manuel writes:

Hey, moron, the rest of the world doesn't get to vote in the American elections—in case you didn't know, you fucking moron. Thank GOD for that. If more people in the U.S. like Kerry, then they should have registered to vote, but of course they are too stupid and lazy. Again, thank GOD for that.

Thank you for having someone read my column to you.

---

Kyle Towers, a manufacturing engineer in Avilla, Indiana, writes:

I was bowled over by the indignation regarding "conservative schemes to make the states, instead of the federal government, responsible for the general social welfare." Apparently Mr. Harkavy is less than familiar with the Constitution of the U.S. . . . If Mr. Harkavy can find where the Constitution enumerates the power of Congress to administer the "social programs" that he believes "go begging," I will be mightily impressed. Assuming that he cannot (a reasonable assumption), then any efforts directed toward shifting such responsibilities can only be interpreted as being moves to restore constitutional government to the U.S. That doesn't deserve to be derided and dismissed as "conservative schemes."

Thank you for reading. I guess I just don't understand, Kyle, why the Constitution's "promote the general welfare" has to mean "promote corporate welfare."

---

Mike Callis of Tennessee writes:

Y'all are a bunch of nut cases.

Thank you for reading. Well, Mike, some of us are. But at least that's better than being a pod person.

---

Neil Tessler writes:

The preeminent source of quality information on Chechnya—that gives you the full measure of the mead, without your actually having your ear sliced off before you're garroted—is the Yahoo group Chechnya-sl.

I have been following this collection of readings from all sides of the conflict for four years, from about the time the Russians rocketed the Grozny public market, killing several hundred people (denying they ever did it) as the prelude to the carpet bombing of Grozny (which also never happened). From beginning to the present, to read the harrowing reality vs. the endless string of Russian denials is an enormous political education. Lazy Western journalists and indifferent politicians simply don't have a clue as to the significance of what is occurring, who this Putin is with whom they are all kissy-face. The Russians take America's lead but go the next step with language and action as total as that of the Asiatic hordes of the Dark Ages.

Thank you for reading. And Neil, thanks for the suggestion. I signed up for Chechnya-sl (Chechnya Short List), and e-mail started pouring in, much of it invaluable translations into English from European papers and TV. Run by Norbert Strade out of Denmark, the site is much more of a news service than a typical moderated discussion list. And what stories! Whew! Frightening, absurd, eerie, sad. A real tangle of political and human drama, from all sides.

Mixed with the more dramatic stuff are snatches of background material that may help people try to understand what's going on over there. On September 21, for example, members of the newsgroup received a translation of some fascinating history, part of it a 60-year-old text written by Caucasus historian Abdurahkman Avtorkhanov. (For a fascinating modern perspective on this major figure, see this Chechen Times piece.) Plus, there was the added background of how Stalin, who had revived the Chechnya-Ingushetia region and had even given it some autonomy, suddenly reversed himself in the mid '40s. He uprooted all the inhabitants of what was Chechnya-Ingushetia and expelled them to what is now Kazakhstan, liquidating overnight their "republic."

(Digression: In 1957, many of the exiles were allowed by Khrushchev to return; they were, and are, brimming with bitterness. When the Soviet empire collapsed, Chechnya declared independence, but hardly any other country recognized it. In 1994, Boris Yeltsin sent troops there to prevent secession—southern Chechnya has valuable reserves of oil. Between 1994 and 2002, almost 40,000 people have been killed in the warfare between Russian federal troops and various feuding Chechen factions, by some accounts. What a tragic mess. End of digression.)

The September 21 Chechnya-sl post continued:

It is well-known that the Bolsheviks considered the struggle of oppressed peoples for their national liberation and independence as justifiable when it took place before the establishment of the Soviet regime. Any national liberation struggle in the Soviet Union, on the other hand, was not only condemned but mercilessly quelled.

Russia is Russia, in other words, whether it's Soviet or post-Soviet. Russian President Vladimir Putin is eager to portray the present Caucasus turbulence as part of "international terrorism" and somehow tied to the Bush-Cheney "war on terror." But the revolt Putin faces has deeper roots than that.

You'll find a link to Chechnya-sl on this Danish page of English links to Chechnya info. You can also go to Wikipedia's Chechnya page to get a ton of other links and info. It's worth the trouble, if for no other reason than Putin is a player in American politics and business. And he's a pal not just of Republicans, but also Democrats. More on that later.

Posted by wharkavy at 3:42 PM

September 22, 2004

It's Iraq, Stupid

There for the taking: Plenty of real documents about a real screw-up taking place right now

Why bother with phony documents? There's plenty of real stuff for John Kerry's advisers to pick through in their scramble to nail the Bush regime. All they have to do is think about the Americans dying in the current idiotic war. They're finally doing so, but they're not taking full advantage of what's out there to point to the Bush-Cheney team's disastrous handling of a bad situation.

For example, Reconstructing Iraq, a report released earlier this month by the sober, serious International Crisis Group, politely but firmly rips the hell out of U.S. occupation officials not only for screwups and not only for wrongheaded policies but for letting ideology get in the way. More frightening for the health of our troops over there, the Bush administration's monumental mishandling of Iraq's economic "recovery" after its deceitful invasion is feeding the violence and insurgency and practically assuring that the country will devolve into full-fledged civil war.

Understand that these aren't "anarchists" criticizing the Bush regime. The non-profit Brussels-based ICG is anything but wild-eyed. Its board chair is Martti Ahtisaari, former president of Finland. The vice chair is former New York City congressman Stephen Solarz, hardly a radical, and for every Democrat like Wesley Clark and Zbigniew "Zbig" Brzezinski on its board, there's a Carla Hills or some big muckamuck from another country, like Ruth Dreifuss, the former president of Switzerland.

So listen when the ICG says that the Coalition Provisional Authority "made a hard job harder." Here's more:

For the most part, the occupation forces came without a plan. What strategy they had benefited from little if any Iraqi input, was heavily shaped by ideology and repeatedly subject to Washington's political deadlines. CPA plans for complete economic overhaul quickly encountered stiff opposition by Iraqis intent on their own long-term strategy; shifting course, the CPA took ad hoc decisions, leaving unresolved crucial policy questions for fear of triggering even greater discontent. Thus, it was originally fixated on large-scale privatization but, facing Iraqi hostility, neither privatized nor relinquished the objective. As a result, it failed to devise an alternative approach that might have revived ailing state companies so they could be used to find temporary jobs for the unemployed.

Looks like the only things we brought with us that have made a smooth transition were our Halliburtonian economic principles. "Inadequate transparency and accountability in the contracting process," the report says, "combined with real or alleged corruption, have fed distrust of both occupation authorities and Iraqi institutions."

And of course, the report makes clear that the current Iraq "regime" is not only plagued with problems but is also nothing more than a puppet of the U.S., a fact that the American press continues to play down:

Many issues that vexed the CPA remain. The Interim Government, for example, will be reluctant to make broad economic changes lest it be accused of usurping an elected government's prerogatives. As Lebanon's precedent shows, allocating power and positions along ethnic/sectarian lines risks encouraging a parallel apportionment of public jobs and resources, with corruption and malfeasance as by-products. Nor have the occupation authorities truly disappeared: The U.S. remains powerful and, importantly, controls most reconstruction funds.

Last fall, of course, things really started breaking down. The U.S. media were full of words and pictures about all the economic "progress" that was being made, but hardly anyone was paying attention to the hard facts and figures. The Pentagon's weekly PowerPoint reports, more depressing than any slide show you've ever had to sit through, were freely available on the U.S. Department of Commerce's Export.gov site.They told a different story. Under the Pentagon's pasha, L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer, we were spending basically zero on health care. And the reports showed that oil-rich Iraq was steadily increasing its imports of basic fuels like gasoline. Our exports of oil were sluggish even before widespread sabotage of the oilfields and refineries started.

These days, those weekly reports are being issued by the State Department. The latest report shows that we're still spending basically nothing out of what we've committed to health care, but we're increasing our spending on "private-sector" development. The State Department, not in thrall to the neocon nabobs who still infest the Pentagon, has at least added a small dose of rationality to the weekly reports. On the slide listing "Stability Contributors," the latest report says there are 33 countries (including the U.S.) plus NATO "potentially supporting Iraqi stability and humanitarian relief." Note the word "potentially."

As to the specifics of security, the families and friends of U.S. troops fighting to stay alive over there will be pleased to know the latest figures on a "Civilian Intervention Force" set up to take over some security duties for your loved ones. There are zero "on hand," zero "already trained," and zero "in training." But there are 4,800 "planned."

Posted by wharkavy at 1:26 PM

U.S. Government Explains Our Elections to Iraqi Journalists

Now please tell us

It looks like we've spent money to bring Iraqi journalists to the U.S. so we can explain our political campaigns to them. I'm happy to have them join us, but how about letting the American people in on the explanation?

According to a State Department weekly update of our "progress" in Iraq, the U.S. Media and Political Campaigns International Visitor Program, running from September 5 to September 25, is designed to help Iraqi journalists "examine the role of the media in U.S. political campaigns and the particular symbiosis between the media and the candidates they cover."

Yeah, there's a symbiotic relationship going on between the U.S. press and U.S. pols, and the first analogy that springs to mind is the relationship between "slug" and "host" that's personified by the character of Lieutenant Jadzia Dax in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The Free Dictionary explains:

Dax is a Trill symbiont, a very long-lived slug-shaped entity that is hosted by a succession of humanoid Trills, a process called "joining."

Posted by wharkavy at 1:26 PM

September 21, 2004

No Al Qaeda-Iraq Link, U.S. Said After 9-11

State Department's 'Network of Terrorism' in November 2001 didn't include the country we later invaded

Don't listen to the campaign words. Look at what the U.S. State Department was saying two months after 9-11: A "Network of Terrorism" web page called "Countries Where al Qaeda Has Operated", posted November 10, 2001, and still on the official government site as of this afternoon, lists 45 countries, but not Iraq—or Syria, for that matter. The U.S. and Saudi Arabia made the list, of course.

Fellow writer Laurel Maury tipped me off to this page, but word is coursing around the Internet, so who knows how long the government will leave it up. Hurry! Get your government facts while they're hot.

The page is part of an elaborate package on Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, led off by an essay attributed to George W. Bush called "An Attack on the Civilized World." He doesn't mention Iraq, either.

Posted by wharkavy at 5:58 PM

RNC: The Movie

You didn't know it, but Medium Hot was shot on dislocation during the convention

The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was blazingly hot—chaotic protests, berserk cops, old pols shaking their fists at impertinent youth.

Among other memorable chronicles (like the saga of the Chicago Seven), that convention produced cinematographer Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool (1969), which brilliantly threaded a fictional narrative into documentarian footage.

Now, 36 years later, in an era in which disobedience in the face of another unjust war is far too civil, we're still trying to recover from the totalitarian frostbite of the chillingly cold Republican National Convention—protesters abandoned by their natural allies in the national Democratic Party and subjected to pre-emptive plastic handcuffery practiced by thousands of troops before a mostly complaisant press corps.

But coming soon to a theater near you will be Medium Hot, the working title of a fact/fiction project on the RNC by New York filmmaker Charles "Chip" Krezell. In a way, it will be a riff on Wexler.

Judging by Krezell's notable 28-minute video Not My President, a nice slice of protest life at the January 2001 coronation in D.C. of George W. Bush, Medium Hot ought to be worthwhile. (See Not My President here, courtesy of the Free Speech Network.)

From what Krezell tells me, Medium Hot, "shot in a guerrilla style," is a properly 21st-century update of Wexler: "Two guys come to NYC to shoot video of the convention," they meet a girl, a romance follows. After things heat up in the street, Krezell says, "the two guys get radicalized."

Krezell's actors mixed with "real" people during the convention protests, and the shooting went well, he tells me. "Things were pretty crazy," he says. "We ended up with 43 tapes, and more are coming in."

Immediately after the convention, he took his actors back out onto the streets to finish the shooting.

Going with the flow, Krezell altered his story line "to reflect the police tactics." He adds, "It wasn't much different than I had imagined—with the heavy-handed, swarming cop squads—except that it didn't erupt into violence. The effectiveness of police actions frustrated people trying to protest, and the pre-emptive arrests and prolonged detainments used until Bush left town are all part of the story line now."

But don't mistake this for a strict homage either to Wexler or to Marshall McLuhan.

"My idea for Medium Hot," he says, "was to take the original story as a reflection of the times—with the digital accessibility of media to the masses, the medium has passed from McLuhan's cool to hot, with everyone embedded in their own movie. The notion of objectivity that Wexler played with doesn't wash anymore. Everything is subjective, for better or worse. To find a middle ground is much more difficult now than it was even in '68."

Posted by wharkavy at 4:37 PM

September 20, 2004

Vote Early! Vote Often!

Unless you're overseas, where the Pentagon is keeping you from registering

You probably thought that with Katherine Harris now a member of Congress, she could do less harm to the small-D democratic process in that mostly moribund D.C. bunch than she did in 2000 as Florida's secretary of state.

Maybe that's true, but the election chicanery has already started, and of course some of it's from her successor and some of it's from Don Rumsfeld's Pentagon. I mean, you can't properly influence an election without troops.

Expatriate American Marina Mecl writes to us from Munich with a plea for help. The Pentagon, using the excuse that it's worried about hackers, is blocking overseas Americans' access to the Federal Voting Assistance Program's website, where U.S. voters living abroad can go to download voting forms and get information on registering to vote. (The deadline in most states is October 2.) In "Pentagon Blocking Web Sites," the International Herald Tribune's Jennifer Joan Lee points out that ISPs in at least 25 countries—including Japan, France, Britain, and Spain—have been denied access to the site. And, yes, the humorously named FVAP is indeed under the aegis of the Pentagon, because the site focuses on reaching our hundreds of thousands of imperial troops around the planet.

Asked by Lee whether other government websites have been blocked, the Pentagon declined comment. Her thorough story quotes Annalee Newitz of the watchdog Electronic Frontier Foundation as saying, "It's extremely ironic that the government is doing nothing to address the security of electronic voting machines" in the U.S., "which have been proven to be vulnerable to hacking, yet they block websites for expatriate Americans."

Mecl suggests Overseas Vote 2004, a site set up by the Kerry campaign, for you scattered Americans to register and request absentee ballots. Hurry up and do it, because it looks as if Florida is once again going to try to enforce our Founding Fathers' original aim of considering each black person only three-fifths of a human being.

Florida's secretary of state this time around is Glenda Hood, and there's little evidence that this Glenda will turn out to be a good witch. The former Orlando mayor, Hood was appointed secretary of state (Florida's chief elections officer) in February 2003 by Governor Jeb Bush. She no doubt qualified for that job by, among other things, contributing $1,000 to the Republican Party of Florida on June 26, 2002. She and Harris each tithed to the Florida GOP on January 8, 2001, just before the start of George W. Bush's term—Harris gave $300 that day, and Hood chipped in $900, according to the Federal Election Commission.

Almost exactly four years ago—on September 25, 2000—Hood poured in $5,000 to the Florida GOP. This time around, she'll have a chance to prove her love of the party in a different way.

Just yesterday, the Associated Press reported that the Justice Department is probing alleged intimidation of elderly black voters by Florida state cops this past spring after Democrat Buddy Dyer won a narrow victory to become Orlando's new mayor.

Posted by wharkavy at 2:40 PM

Cheney's Crude Pal

Kazakhstan's Nazarbayev oversees a parliamentary vote blasted as unfair

Intimidation of voters seems to be working well in one of Dick Cheney's favorite countries, Kazakhstan. The AP reported today that "Kazakhstan voted for a largely toothless Parliament on Sunday in an election marred by low turnout, widespread irregularities, and a climate of intimidation." See this previous Bush Beat item for background on Cheney's link to the bubbling Kazakhgate scandal, and check out Eurasianet's latest story on the phony Kazakhstan vote engineered by dictator and Cheney pal Nursultan Nazarbayev.

This was no surprise. Before the election, Human Rights Watch criticized the dictatorship for harassing its political opponents.

By the way, that Kazakhgate scandal, in which major U.S. oil companies and pols are likely to get ink, won't start gushing in the mainstream press until after the November 2 election: As expected, the trial of James Giffen has been delayed until January, much to the relief of Cheney, who was on Nazarbayev's Oil Advisory Board before becoming Bush's Geppetto.

Posted by wharkavy at 2:30 PM

Democracy Inaction

Inside—or outside—a Cheney 'town hall meeting'

Rick Lyman of The New York Times wrote a pretty funny piece Sunday about trying to get close to Dick Cheney. Ha-ha.

In "Desperating Seeking Dick Cheney", the Timesman was miffed that the vice president wouldn't give a seat on the official plane to a representative of the Paper of Record.

Average citizens have the same problem just trying to attend one of the stump speeches by this 21st century Dr. Strangelove. On TV, Cheney appears to have everyone at his campaign appearances enthralled. But that's because his adoring crowds are carefully screened.

Faithful correspondent Jimmy Moore of Fairfield, Iowa, tells me that just before a Cheney speech last week in nearby Ottumwa, protesters showed up with such props as a Halliburton lemonade stand selling drinks for $45 a glass and a woman "in Arab clothing" holding a sign that said, "Four More Months."

The Cheney event was called a "town hall meeting," but you needed a "ticket" to get in, Moore says. It was clear that the guy with the sign "Here's Your Hat—What's Your Hurry?" was not going to get one of those tickets to Cheney's speech in a industrial park hangar five miles from downtown Ottumwa and carefully roped off from everyone but the screened guests. Some "town hall" meeting this was. The guy's sign prompted queries from reporters, so he told them, according to Moore, "I'll bet you the First Amendment that it'll look homey inside the hangar." He added, "Bullheadedness is not leadership. Elephants die when they rush into tar pits. And Iraq is a tar pit."

It turns out that this "town hall" meeting was worse than a ticketed event. Iowa GOP officials told grumbling locals that there were tickets, but Ottumwa GOP officials said there were no tickets. There was only a list, as the Ottumwa Courier later described the undemocratic situation in "Questions Linger About Cheney Access". If you weren't on the list, forget it.

And of course the national press corps fell for this crap. The Washington Post's Lisa Rein, for instance, described this carefully staged Ottumwa event as a "town hall meeting."

And so did the White House, whose official transcript starts this way:

THE VICE PRESIDENT: Morning. (Applause.) Morning, everybody. (Applause.) Good morning. (Applause.) Thank you very much. Sit down, please.

Cheney fielded five questions—if you can call them that. They were clearly set-ups. The first one focused on them there liberal judges:

Q: We see judges taking the laws and just getting away with them, and they're making laws instead of enforcing them. How is that going to be addressed?

The second one was about our heroic "war on terror":

Q: Do you see Russia taking a more aggressive stance and standing more strongly with us as we continue to fight terrorists around the globe?

The third one was a lob to Cheney about jobs:

Q: With all the jobs that are being exported, what are we doing to try to conserve—bringing those jobs back into the United States, and keeping jobs here?

Cheney's reply, which would have been hooted down if he said it at a real town hall meeting, was this:

Well, the most important thing I think we can do here in the United States is to make the U.S. the best place in the world to do business.

The next question was the softest possible query about the Iraq morass:

Q: Mr. Vice President, I would like to know what we can do as a community to help our military overseas, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan?

That gave Cheney a chance to say this:

Well, the remarkable thing is to get a chance to spend some time with our folks who are serving, or have served, or are just back from over there. It's the most remarkable group of people you're ever going to want to see.

Which was the perfect setup for the final "question":

Q: Mr. Vice President. I'm in the United States Army. I just spent six months in Iraq, and I was injured there in June. And I have been home for about three months now. And I just wanted to say I left supporting you guys, and after being there, I support you guys even more—after seeing what those people had to go through and how they lived. And I ran missions handing out food and water to people there. And having those people—and be there with them for six months is—it was amazing. And I truly understand what we're doing over there. And I thank you for doing what you did.

To which Cheney replied:

Well, thank you very much for doing what you did. (Applause.) I can't think of a better note to end on than that one.

Posted by wharkavy at 2:30 PM

September 17, 2004

Send In the Marine

The wrong general is secretary of state

Commander of CENTCOM during Bush the Elder's Gulf war last decade, retired general Anthony Zinni of the U.S. Marine Corps has the cred to talk about what's going on now. He was even Bush Junior's envoy to the Middle East early on, trying to restart the Israeli-Arab peace process as the key to promoting stability in the region. Until, that is, the neocons and oil-hungry Dick Cheney combined to shove him aside.

Three years later, what is happening is that, right in the middle of the fragile Middle East, Iraq is plummeting into full-fledged civil war, and Americans are dying over there for nothing. On Wednesday, the Iraqi daily paper Addaawa noted, "The wave of violence overwhelming Iraq is central for those who care about the country. What is astonishing in the bloody scene of Iraq is the intermingling of political and criminal aspects."

Zinni also can't be accused of being a Monday-morning quarterback. In a powerful speech this past May at a Center for Defense Information dinner, the general recalled his Senate testimony just before last year's invasion of Iraq by the Bush regime:

I testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee one month before the war, and Senator [Richard] Lugar asked me: "General Zinni, do you feel the threat from Saddam Hussein is imminent?" I said: "No, not at all." It was not an imminent threat. Not even close. Not grave, gathering, imminent, serious, severe, mildly upsetting, none of those.

Zinni's speech laid out what he called "10 crucial mistakes," and he suggested solutions, starting with a sincere, "mature" effort to enlist the U.N., instead of just "dropping paper" on the other nations with our own list of what we're going to do.

This is not the sort of thing that Doug Feith and other fanatical neocon supporters of Israel's right-wing government want other Americans to hear, but the tragic battle between Israelis and Arabs is one of the keys to peace in Iraq. Zinni recalled the insane patter during the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq:

I couldn't believe what I was hearing about the benefits of this strategic move. That the road to Jerusalem led through Baghdad, when just the opposite is true: The road to Baghdad led through Jerusalem. You solve the Middle East peace process, you'd be surprised what kinds of other things will work out.

The idea that we will walk in and be met with open arms. The idea that we will have people that will glom on to democracy overnight. The idea that strategically we will reform, reshape, and change the Middle East by this action—we've changed it all right.

So we had a basic flawed strategy. All those that believed this was going to be the catalyst for some kind of positive change out there, or some sort of revolutionary change in the region, I think got more than they bargained for, and didn't understand the region, the culture, the situation, and the issues, and the effect that what they were about to do was going to have on those.

Once we got to Iraq, of course, we kept hanging on to our ignorance of the region the way an inexperienced stagecoach driver with a runaway team of horses jerks the reins tighter and tighter. One of the most telling episodes was in July 2003, before we offended Arabs worldwide by poking fun at their johnsons and riding their grandmothers like donkeys. Saddam's sons Uday and Qusay were killed in a battle with U.S. soldiers, but it was the aftermath of their deaths that pointed to U.S. political strategists' lack of shrewdness in not getting the monkey off our back. Zinni recalls it this way:

When we went through that, you know, Weekend at Bernie's session with the sons of Saddam. After we got those two guys, I would've turned those bodies over to the Governing Council. Immediately.

And I would've said to the Governing Council, "You own them. You can bury them according to Muslim tradition within 24 hours. You can show them on Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya. You can bury them and tell the people you verified who they are. They're yours."

What did we do? We kept the bodies. We violated Muslim traditional burial. We showed them out to the world. We owned the problem, and that was a small problem that could've been put on their back, to begin kind of transferring that monkey.

And as for the military intelligence that justified our invasion? "The books were cooked, in my mind," Zinni said. "The intelligence was not there."

In Zinni's case, however, that's not true. The general's nothing if not web-friendly, but here's one more piece of evidence from elsewhere. In October 2002, Zinni sorted through our country's options during a speech at the Middle East Institute in D.C. This is how Salon put it:

Zinni stressed the need to get the Israeli-Palestinian peace process back on track, build a broad coalition against Iraq, create trust among allies in the region—and put Saddam Hussein's threat in perspective.

He also took issue with hawks in and around the administration who downplay the importance of Arab sentiment in the region. "I'm not sure which planet they live on," Zinni said, "because it isn't the one that I travel."

Now that is true. Bush thinks it's his own planet.

Posted by wharkavy at 3:19 PM

Solitaire Confinement for Bush

He's not playing with a full deck, but you can

Tough-talking George W. Bush, who spent some of his National Guard tour on the harrowing front lines of Alabama's Battle of Blount, wears on you after a while. At least, that's the only explanation you can think of for the fascination of the W Deck of playing cards that meticulously morphs mugs of Junior onto an astonishing array of photos of gowns, swimwear, and other garb from decades past.

He's a veritable Suzanne Lenglen on the six of clubs and a cheesy '50s covergirl on the jack of hearts. The joker is wild: Imagine J. Fred Muggs (with Bush's face), dressed in a darling little jumpsuit.

As the presidential campaign heads into its final six weeks, artistic minds are apparently entering Dada-land, where the operative words are "deliberate irrationality, cynicism, and anarchy." Does that mean another invasion of those darn anarchists?

This crazy and crucial (but still unnamable) moment in American history deserves even more questions:

Where now? Who now? When now? Unquestioning. I, say I. Unbelieving. Questions, hypotheses, call them that. Keep going, going on, call that going, call that on.

Posted by wharkavy at 3:19 PM

Secrecy Revealed

A new Waxman report shows that Bush is not just running, but also hiding

While the mainstream media take most of us on a Swift boat ride to nowhere, the Bush regime has dropped some of us off in a harsh, deadly desert. What's going on? We may never know, if California congressman Henry Waxman is right.

He just released Secrecy in the Bush Administration, a report analyzing how the Bush regime has expanded and refined the memory hole. Here's part of the intro:

The report analyzes how the Administration has implemented each of our nation’s major open-government laws. It finds that there has been a consistent pattern in the Administration’s actions: Laws that are designed to promote public access to information have been undermined, while laws that authorize the government to withhold information or to operate in secret have repeatedly been expanded. The cumulative result is an unprecedented assault on the principle of open government.

The feisty Waxman's Government Reform Committee Minority Office is one congressional operation that's still functioning. Particularly handy, especially now, is Iraq on the Record, a March 2004 catalog of "a searchable collection of 237 specific misleading statements about the threat posed by Iraq" made by Bush, Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condoleezza Rice.

Posted by wharkavy at 3:19 PM

September 16, 2004

Earth to Bush: Get Out!

Survey of beings on third planet from the sun indicates rejection of Texan

The Pecksniffian editors over at The New York Times apparently don't care whether Americans know this, but the rest of the planet has endorsed John Kerry over George W. Bush.

I know, I know, that's no big surprise—especially because the rest of the planet doesn't depend on the mostly simplistic and jingoistic U.S. press and TV. Those of you who have ever watched CNN International know that Aaron Brown and Anderson Cooper are featherweights compared with the likes of Jonathan Mann or Monita Raipal.

The U.S. media didn't exactly give major play to this serious-minded poll, at least as far as I can tell. And it's not because some peaceniks conducted it. More than 30,000 people were surveyed this summer by Canadian research firm GlobeScan and the Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA) of the University of Maryland. The results indicated that Kerry was favored by more than a 2-1 ratio overall.

"Only one in five want to see Bush re-elected," said PIPA director Steven Kull. "Though he is not as well-known, Kerry would win handily if the people of the world were to elect the U.S. president." Support for Kerry, says PIPA, was greater among those with higher education and incomes. Check out the details at PIPA's interesting site.

You'll discover that Bush's strongholds, such as they are, seem to be Poland, the Philippines, and Nigeria. Don't ask me why.

Kerry, said PIPA, was "strongly preferred among all of America's traditional allies." In Norway, the Kerry-Bush split was 74 percent to 7 percent. Even in the United Kingdom, Kerry trounced Bush, 47-16.

In fact, PIPA noted, "Interestingly, among countries that have contributed troops to the operation in Iraq, most favored Kerry and said that their view of the U.S. has gotten worse with Bush's foreign policy."

The only country to give Bush more than 50 percent was the Philippines, where he won 57-32. "Bush's post–9-11 aid to the Filipino government's efforts against the terrorist group Abu Sayyaf may have engendered significant goodwill," PIPA said.

Attention, my Latino brothers and sisters in the U.S.: "Latin Americans went for Kerry in all nine countries polled," said PIPA.

Posted by wharkavy at 4:45 PM

Punk Rock to Breaking Rocks

NYC filmmaker sentenced in Afghanistan

CBGB oh my fucking unbelievable God, I'm in an Afghanistan prison. Eddy Caraballo, a Bronx-born, Emmy-winning filmmaker who famously documented the '80s punk scene on the Lower East Side, just got an eight-year bid from an Afghan judge for allegedly participating in torture. He was in Afghanistan filming mercenary Jonathan "Jack" Idema, a former Poughkeepsie felon who was a loose-cannon, Green Beret mercenary supposedly on the hunt for Osama bin Laden.

Check out this Los Angeles Times story on the trial and sentencing. It points to a lot that's fishy, including complicity by U.S. officials—none of whom testified, incidentally, on behalf of Idema, Caraballo, and others who were convicted. Authorities had busted them in July, discovering tortured Afghans with them. (Rumsfeld probably decided that it wouldn't be such a good idea to have U.S. officials stand up for Americans accused of torturing Arabs.) The story notes:

The defense presented several videotapes shot by Caraballo, including one showing Idema meeting a man. The man, who Idema said was an American Army captain coordinating counter-terrorism activities in Kabul, said Idema's group was "rolling up AQ [Al Qaeda] like it's nobody's business."

The defendants presented video footage showing them being greeted at Kabul airport by senior Afghan government officials, including the city's security commander, the airport manager, and an aide to the former king, Mohammad Zaher Shah.

As for Idema, he's a big-talking tough guy who brags about killing and claims that he was "chief tactics and firearms instructor" for Ron Reagan Jr. in 1984. See Richard S. Ehrlich's extensive Asia Times interview, "Idema: Trigger-Happy and Troublesome."

Posted by wharkavy at 4:45 PM

'Gates of Hell' Now Officially Open

Arab prediction from 2002 comes true

Almost exactly two years ago, when everyone knew that the Bush regime had already decided to invade Iraq, Arab League Secretary-General Amr Musa warned that such a move would "open the gates of hell in the Middle East."

Much of the U.S. press was already tumescent by that time, having been prepped by New York Times fluffer Judith Miller about Saddam Hussein's big and long weapons of mass destruction. So the reaction to Musa's words was predictable. The New York Daily News sneered at Musa and daydreamed of the "tempting opportunity" of "taking out a half dozen tinpot Middle Eastern dictators at one blow." The paper also spewed vitriol at the chickenshit French and Germans, as in this passage:

The best contribution the Fourth Reich can make is to serve as a role model for the Arab Axis: Germany is living proof that even the most debased society, led by the even most fanatical dictator, can—once it is militarily squashed—simulate civilized behavior.

What else would you expect from Daily News publisher Mort Zuckerman? He's chairman of the war-hawk Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, which sadly is under the control of right-wingers in this particularly dangerous era.

Well, it's two years later, and Amr Musa, at an Arab League meeting in Cairo on Tuesday, declared, "The gates of hell are open in Iraq."

Open for business, too, as we've previously noted. (See Halliburton, Dick Cheney, Joe Allbaugh, and Richard R. Burt in previous Bush Beat items for examples of that.)

But leave those profits for a second and listen to these prophets rounded up by The Herald Sun in Melbourne. In "Iraq Anarchy Grows," Australia's biggest daily paper quotes a variety of analysts who agree with Musa.

Hasni Abidi of Algeria, for example, says, "There is a risk of a Somalia-ization of Iraq. Each political party has its own armed militia; the country is in the hands of gangs."

Remember the "Green Zone" the government troops set up around Madison Square Garden to protect the Republican National Convention delegates from their fellow Americans? Well, there's one of those in Baghdad, encompassing the U.S. embassy and the puppet regime we installed, and it's just one piece of evidence, says Abidi, that "the transfer of sovereignty was illusory."

Abidi is director of the Geneva-based Study and Research Center for the Arab and Mediterranean World. But don't listen only to Arabs. The paper also quotes Mark Heller, an analyst with Israel's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, as saying that the only options in Iraq are either "brutal repression" or what the paper called "some sort of power-sharing deal between Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds."

As if the current U.S. government is interested in sharing power of any kind. And the other option noted by Heller isn't necessarily under anyone's control. "Brutal repression" isn't just a policy. It also just happens when you're in the wrong place at the wrong time. Take last Sunday in Baghdad, when a U.S. chopper launched rockets and fired machine-gun rounds into a crowd.

Posted by wharkavy at 4:45 PM

Your Corporate Congress at Work

Big-footed non-human citizens would get a huge tax break if this House bill sneaks through

While Iraq is being savaged by civil war, America is being pillaged again by a "Fifth Column"—actually a column in corporate financial ledgers.

The watchdog Center on Budget and Policy Priorities has issued a new warning of a current U.S. House bill that would savage state budgets already devastated by conservative schemes to make the states, instead of the federal government, responsible for the general social welfare.

I guess the federal government can't take care of its citizens if it's spending—this is literally a conservative estimate, courtesy of Don Rumsfeld—$4 billion a month in Iraq.

While U.S. companies scramble to profit from that misadventure, social programs at home go begging—that burden continues to shift to the states. Meanwhile, a bill is expected to quietly creep through the House Judiciary Committee in the next few weeks that would drastically reduce the ability of states to tax U.S. companies. (Don't worry; if you're a corporeal citizen, instead of a corporate citizen, you will still be taxed.)

The bill, H.R. 3220, has a hilarious name: “Business Activity Tax Simplification Act of 2003." It was introduced by Virginia Republican Bob Goodlatte, a co-chair of the Congressional Internet Caucus. He touts the bill as a "common-sense solution to nonsensical tax schemes." Goodlatte says it would help Internet-based businesses.

Oh, it's "schemes" he's against, huh? Among other things the bill would do to help corporate citizens, the center notes:

The legislation would cause state and local governments collectively to lose substantial tax payments from out-of-state corporations that would be freed from their current obligations to pay taxes on their profits and gross sales to particular jurisdictions. A significant share of currently taxable corporate profits would go untaxed by any state, leading to a net revenue loss for the states as a whole.

A whole wave of new corporate tax shelters would be possible. This kind of monkey business is so typical of a dangerous trend to reduce corporate taxes. New York Democratic congressmen Greg Meeks and Joe Crowley (usually a fighting liberal) are, for some reason, among the bill's 30 co-sponsors. Maybe they think this bill will help small businesses instead of big corporations. They're dead wrong, according the center, which also notes:

The most significantly affected taxes would be the corporate income taxes levied by 45 states, the District of Columbia, and New York City.

Check out the center's crystal-clear explanation by staffer Michael Mazerov of the horror of this bill. "Horror" is not too strong a word, as you'll see. The Republicans are always talking about "tort reform." They claim to hate lawsuits. Well, this bill would create an avalanche of lawsuits against your state governments by big businesses seeking tax breaks.

Mazerov says the bill "would reward major multistate corporations that have the resources to engage in aggressive tax-avoidance behavior with much lower tax burdens than their small, locally-oriented competitors." He gives real-world examples that drive his points home:

¶ A bank would not be taxable within a state even if it hired independent contractors there to process mortgage loan applications and the loans were secured by homes located within the state.

¶ A restaurant franchisor like Subway or Dunkin' Donuts would not be taxable in a state no matter how many franchisees it had in the state and no matter how often its employees entered the state to solicit sales of supplies to the franchisees.

It's doubtful that the House members who signed on as co-sponsors realized the bill's implications. To check out the full list of co-sponsors, and for other information, go to the official Congress site. If you're pissed enough, go to Congress.

Posted by wharkavy at 4:45 PM

More Taxing News for Humans

Bush's cuts? You'll feel the pain

A grim update from, once again, the really good bad-news bearers at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Scrambling to crunch the numbers, the center has recalculated the impact of George W. Bush's tax cuts. The new news is even worse.

Here's an excerpt from the center's reconfigured report analyzing an August report by the Congressional Budget Office:

The top one percent will gain by far the most from the tax cuts even though it has already been the main beneficiary of income trends since the 1970s. Data from a separate CBO study, released in April of this year, indicate that between 1979 and 2001 (the latest year CBO examined), the average after-tax income of the top one percent of households rose by a stunning $409,000, or 139 percent, after adjusting for inflation.[1] This dwarfed the $6,300, or 17 percent, average increase among the middle fifth of the population, over this 22-year period, and the $1,100, or 8 percent, increase among the bottom fifth of the population.

Added to that not-quite-old news is that the center's revised report also notes that "the Economic Policy Institute finds that the number of jobs created in the wake of the tax cuts has already fallen 2.7 million jobs short of Administration predictions made in 2003."

And what about this Economic Policy Institute, which the center so graciously credits? Just today, it released a report by Elise Gould entitled "Employer-Provided Health Insurance Fall