Attractive Women 0.0% Unemployment Rate

The Onion headline 5 years later still rings true, "hot women still have an unemployment rate of 0.0%." Now pharmaceutical companies are targeting cheerleaders to sell their drugs and of course Memphis is leader in this movement with Spirited Sales Leaders. Yes, that is the real name.

From the New York Times:
Gimme an Rx! Cheerleaders Pep Up Drug Sales
By STEPHANIE SAUL
As an ambitious college student, Cassie Napier had all the right moves - flips, tumbles, an ever-flashing America's sweetheart smile - to prepare for her job after graduation. She became a drug saleswoman.

Ms. Napier, 26, was a star cheerleader on the national-champion University of Kentucky squad, which has been a springboard for many careers in pharmaceutical sales. She now plies doctors' offices selling the antacid Prevacid for TAP Pharmaceutical Products.

Ms. Napier says the skills she honed performing for thousands of fans helped land her job. "I would think, essentially, that cheerleaders make good sales people," she said.

Anyone who has seen the parade of sales representatives through a doctor's waiting room has probably noticed that they are frequently female and invariably good looking. Less recognized is the fact that a good many are recruited from the cheerleading ranks.

"There's a saying that you'll never meet an ugly drug rep," said Dr. Thomas Carli of the University of Michigan. He led efforts to limit access to the representatives who once trolled hospital hallways.
...
"They don't ask what the major is," Mr. Williamson said. Proven cheerleading skills suffice. "Exaggerated motions, exaggerated smiles, exaggerated enthusiasm - they learn those things, and they can get people to do what they want."

While there are no statistics on how many drug representatives are former or current cheerleaders, demand for them led to the formation of an employment firm, Spirited Sales Leaders, in Memphis. It maintains a database of thousands of potential candidates.

"The cheerleaders now are the top people in universities; these are really capable and high-profile people," said Gregory C. Webb, who is also a principal in a company that runs cheerleading camps and employs former cheerleaders. He started Spirited Sales Leaders about 18 months ago because so many cheerleaders were going into drug sales. He said he knew several hundred former cheerleaders who had become drug representatives.

"There's a lot of sizzle in it," said Mr. Webb. "I've had people who are going right out, maybe they've been out of school for a year, and get a car and make up to $50,000, $60,000 with bonuses, if they do well." Compensation sometimes goes well into six figures.

The American Plan For Withdrawal From Iraq

Here's the transcript from Sy Hersh on CNN's Late Edition with WOlf Blizter. It's an amazing interview. Thanks to Ademption at DailyKos for the transcript.

HERSH: Well, you know, what I was writing about in The New Yorker this week is our plan is to pull out American troops if we start to do that. And I think the president probably will next year. But the war is not going to slow down. We're going to increase the pace of air operations. There's going to be more bombing in direct support of Iraqi units now.

BLITZER: Let me read to you what you write in The New Yorker magazine, the article entitled "Up in the Air." "A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President's public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units."

HERSH: Absolutely. Not very competent. Very weak. And if we must -- many of them Shiite, many of them controlled by militias. I mean, they're not necessarily loyal to any particular regime. And if we pull away the American ground support and the American air support, they're in trouble.

But if we -- we can take out troops if we increase air. In other words, the temple of air bombing, bombing's sort of the unknown story right now. We don't know how many bombs are dropped, where. Nobody reports publicly as they did, Wolf, in Vietnam.

During the Vietnam war, we got a daily total of how many missions, sorties per day, how much tonnage. We have no idea here how many bombs are actually dropping every day and where. But the idea is, you increase the pace of the bombing. And that will make an inadequate Iraqi unit be able to stand up a little bit, certainly against the insurgency. That's the thinking.

BLITZER: And then you go on to write this: "The prospect of using air power as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection. 'Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame someone else?' another senior military planner now on assignment in the Pentagon asked."

Your concern, specifically, is that American air power, which can be decisive, clearly, is going to be used for untoward, for bad purposes.

HERSH: It's not my concern. It's the concern of many senior generals in the air business, you know, in the Air Force. And planners, because they say, this is, you know, the power of American air is enormous. And the idea, it's, and it's, this is a skill.

People talk in terms, to me, the Air Force planners, of the exquisite nature of air bombing. The idea that you're going to turn over this control, this kind of force, to Iraqi units who can be penetrated by the insurgency, that have a lot of internal battles, as I say, many are militias. And they have problems that other people and other militias -- who knows what will motivate them?

BLITZER: So your concern is the spotters on the ground, the people who are going to be targeting, finding targets are going to be Iraqis as owe opposed to Americans. HERSH: It's the concern of a lot of people in the Pentagon. They'll tell you no, that they're going to be joint units. The Pentagon will officially say there's going to be joint units, Iraqi and Americans together. But eventually we know it will evolve into Iraqis calling in targets.

And it's not just spotting. We use a lot of sophisticated laser guided weapons and you have to have somebody on the ground to actually do a strike or illuminate a target with a laser beam for the plane to come in. And as I've had people in the Air Force say to me, what are we going to be bombing? Barracks? Hospitals? You know, who knows who's going to be telling us what to do?

BLITZER: So what you're hearing is that the U.S. air power, the U.S. Air Force, they're getting jittery even thinking about the fact that they may be called in to launch air strikes based on what they're getting from Iraqis on the ground.

HERSH: It is good to know there is a lot of ethics in the Air Force. There's a lot of guys that are, that drop the, they know the force of the weapons they have, and they don't want to be responsible for bombing the wrong targets. They don't want non-Americans telling them what to do. This is a real doctrinal issue that's being fought right now in the Pentagon.

BLITZER: In this new article you have in The New Yorker, you also write this about the president: " 'The president is more determined than ever to stay the course,' the former defense official said. 'He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage, "People may suffer and die, but the Church advances." ' He said that the president had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney. 'They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway,' the former defense official said."

HERSH: Suffice to say this, that this president in private, at Camp David with his friends, the people that I'm sure call him George, is very serene about the war. He's upbeat. He thinks that he's going to be judged, maybe not in five years or ten years, maybe in 20 years. He's committed to the course. He believes in democracy.

HERSH: He believes that he's doing the right thing, and he's not going to stop until he gets -- either until he's out of office, or he falls apart, or he wins.

BLITZER: But this has become, your suggesting, a religious thing for him? HERSH: Some people think it is. Other people think he's absolutely committed, as I say, to the idea of democracy. He's been sold on this notion.

He's a utopian, you could say, in a world where maybe he doesn't have all the facts and all the information he needs and isn't able to change.

I'll tell you, the people that talk to me now are essentially frightened because they're not sure how you get to this guy.

We have generals that do not like -- anymore -- they're worried about speaking truth to power. You know that. I mean that's -- Murtha in fact, John Murtha, the congressman from Pennsylvania, which most people don't know, has tremendous contacts with the senior generals of the armies. He's a ranking old war horse in Defense Appropriations Subcommittee. The generals know him and like him. His message to the White House was much more worrisome than maybe to the average person in the public. They know that generals are privately telling him things that they're not saying to them.

And if you're a general and you have a disagreement with this war, you cannot get that message into the White House. And that gets people unnerved.

BLITZER: Here's what you write. You write, "Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the president remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding."

Those are incredibly strong words, that the president basically doesn't want to hear alternative analysis of what is going on.

HERSH: You know, Wolf, there is people I've been talking to -- I've been a critic of the war very early in the New Yorker, and there were people talking to me in the last few months that have talked to me for four years that are suddenly saying something much more alarming.

They're beginning to talk about some of the things the president said to him about his feelings about manifest destiny, about a higher calling that he was talking about three, four years ago.

I don't want to sound like I'm off the wall here. But the issue is, is this president going to be capable of responding to reality? Is he going to be able -- is he going to be capable if he going to get a bad assessment, is he going to accept it as a bad assessment or is he simply going to see it as something else that is just a little bit in the way as he marches on in his crusade that may not be judged for 10 or 20 years.

He talks about being judged in 20 years to his friends. And so it's a little alarming because that means that my and my colleagues in the press corps, we can't get to him maybe with our views. You and you can't get to him maybe with your interviews.

How do you get to a guy to convince him that perhaps he's not going the right way?

Jack Murtha certainly didn't do it. As I wrote, they were enraged at Murtha in the White House.

And so we have an election coming up -- Yes. I've had people talk to me about maybe Congress is going to have to cut off the budget for this war if it gets to that point. I don't think they're ready to do it now.

But I'm talking about sort of a crisis of management. That you have a management that's seen by some of the people closely involved as not being able to function in terms of getting information it doesn't want to receive.

The US Is Making a Hasty Withdrawal From Iraq

This is a post from Juan Cole's informerd comment blog:

Rubaie: US will Withdraw Completely from Some Areas
Muqtada offers National Pact

Al-Sharq al-Awsat: Muwaffaq al-Rubaie, national security adviser to the Iraqi government, said Saturday that "The American forces will soon turn over complete and total responsibility for security in a number of areas of the country to Iraqi forces." He said that a joint working committee was formed last summer toward that end. He expressed hope that there would be further turn-overs before the Dec. 15 elections, to deprive the guerrilla movement of its pretext for rejecting the political process, i.e. that it is unfolding under the shadow of foreign military occupation.

It is little noted in the US press that US troops have already withdrawn from the cities of Najaf and Karbala. American forces are also withdrawing from military bases in favor of Iraqis. The somewhat ill-fated US hand-over of Saddam's palace complex in Tikrit to the Iraqi government last week was part of this series of withdrawals (the ceremony took mortar fire).

Coalition forces are likely to withdraw from some 15 other Iraqi cities fairly soon. They appear to initially pull back to a garrison outside the city. But if things stay quiet, it is apparently envisaged by al-Rubaie and other Iraqi government figures that they will depart entire provinces. This process is probably problematic only in about 7 or 8 of Iraq's 18 provinces, where an American withdrawal might well result in a takeover by the neo-Baath and the Salafis, or in a civil war among Sunnis and Shiites. What to do about that in the absence of a well-trained, functioning Iraqi army, none of us really knows.

Greenhouse Gas Levels

I'm pay a lot of attention to Antarctic stories and global warming. When I was working down there we would have a weekly science presentation by scientists from NOAA and American Universities. These presentations weren't filtered by Universities or government bureaucracy for political reasons. Needless to say, the presentations were terrifying. If you don't believe in global warming caused by human activity, than you are a dumbass. Here's a story from the LA Times about greenhouse gas levels.

Core Evidence That Humans Affect Climate Change
Ice drilled in Antarctica offers the fullest record of glacial cycles and greenhouse gas levels.

By Usha Lee McFarling, Times Staff Writer


An ice core about two miles long — the oldest frozen sample ever drilled from the underbelly of Antarctica — shows that at no time in the last 650,000 years have levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane been as high as they are today.

The research, published in today's issue of the journal Science, describes the content of the greenhouse gases within the core and shows that carbon dioxide levels today are 27% higher than they have been in the last 650,000 years and levels of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas, are 130% higher, said Thomas Stocker, a climate researcher at the University of Bern and senior member of the European team that wrote two papers based on the core.

The work provides more evidence that human activity since the Industrial Revolution has significantly altered the planet's climate system, scientists said. "This is saying, 'Yeah, we had it right.' We can pound on the table harder and say, 'This is real,' " said Richard Alley, a Penn State University geophysicist and expert on ice cores who was not involved with the analysis.

Previous records, from an ice core drilled at the Russian Antarctic station Vostok, extended back 440,000 years. Extracting and analyzing that core was a major achievement, but the core stopped short of a time period scientists are anxious to study because it was like today's.

Climate scientists called the analysis of the older records spectacular because they were so clear and said they would become "canonical" additions to the climate record. "It's really important," Ed Brook, an ice core expert at Oregon State University said of the new research. "Those 200,000 years were a lot harder to get than the previous 400,000 — and those were hard enough."

Ice cores are plugs drilled from glaciers and ice sheets. They are composed of tens of thousands of layers of fallen snow and air bubbles compressed over time. Ice cores are among the most powerful tools available to climate scientists. The chemistry of the ice reveals temperatures from the distant past, while bubbles within the ice are minuscule time capsules that capture air and greenhouse gases as they existed hundreds of thousands of years ago.

The ice core was drilled by the European Project for Ice Coring in Antarctica from a high plateau in East Antarctica called Dome C that rises about two miles above sea level. It is one of the driest, coldest parts of the continent, where summer temperatures can fall to 50 degrees below zero. Temperature records from the core were published in 2004, and scientists have been waiting for an analysis of the core's gases.

The last time carbon dioxide levels were as high or higher than today was probably tens of millions of years ago, Alley said. Over millions of years, carbon dioxide levels shift because of slow geological processes, such as weathering of rocks, swallowing of crust into subduction zones and the release of gases from volcanoes. But these processes are much slower and more gradual than the current rapid increase of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from the burning of fossil fuels, Alley said.

Scientists are enthusiastic about the ice core because it includes about eight full glacial cycles. The Vostok sample had four. Glacial cycles occur roughly every 100,000 years and include long periods of cold, when ice ages occur, and brief, warm interglacial periods, such as the current one. The cycles are controlled by shakes, wobbles and tilts in the Earth's orbit around the sun that determine the amount of sunlight falling on and warming the planet.

The Vostok core showed that warm interglacial periods lasted about 10,000 years. Because the current temperate interglacial period has lasted about 12,000 years, many scientists had speculated that the planet was overdue for an ice age.

But the new core shows that the interglacial period of 440,000 years ago, when the Earth's position relative to the sun was similar to what it is today, lasted nearly 30,000 years and was not ended by natural decreases in carbon dioxide, Stocker said. The work suggests that the next ice age is about 15,000 years away.

"Anyone counting on an ice age to head off global warming, or hoping to justify human greenhouse-gas emissions as a useful attempt to head off the next ice age, will find no comfort in the ice-core record," Alley said.

The latest findings also run counter to a theory presented two years ago by William Ruddiman, a professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, that humans who lived five thousand or more years ago are responsible for delaying the next ice age because their activities — forest clearing and rice growing — started to raise greenhouse gas levels when they should have been naturally declining.

"This claim can no longer be upheld," said Stocker, because the ice core shows greenhouse gases do not naturally decline after 10,000 years in the longer interglacial periods like today's.

Scientists are eager to look further back into earth's climatic past. About a million years ago, the earth shifted from ice age cycles that were 40,000 years long into cycles that were 100,000 years long. This shift from a "40K world to a 100K world" is a major mystery, said Oregon State's Brook, and will require a core that reaches deeper into the ice and much further back in time.

Brook is co-chairman of a joint European and American group that hopes to start drilling in coming years a core that could produce ice and bubbles that are 1.2 million to 1.5 million years old.

Arguments For Withdrawal From Iraq

This article is from Genreal Odom. He examines the 9 reasons for staying in Iraq and turns them on their heads. The article came from Niemanwatchdog.org.

http://www.niemanwatchdog.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=ask_this.view&askthisid=129

What’s wrong with cutting and running?
ASK THIS | August 03, 2005
Everything that opponents of a pullout say would happen if the U.S. left Iraq is happening already, says retired Gen. William E. Odom, the head of the National Security Agency during the Reagan administration. So why stay?

By William E. Odom

If I were a journalist, I would list all the arguments that you hear against pulling U.S. troops out of Iraq, the horrible things that people say would happen, and then ask: Aren’t they happening already? Would a pullout really make things worse? Maybe it would make things better.


Here are some of the arguments against pulling out:

1) We would leave behind a civil war.

2) We would lose credibility on the world stage.

3) It would embolden the insurgency and cripple the move toward democracy.

4) Iraq would become a haven for terrorists.

5) Iranian influence in Iraq would increase.

6) Unrest might spread in the region and/or draw in Iraq's neighbors.

7) Shiite-Sunni clashes would worsen.

8) We haven’t fully trained the Iraqi military and police forces yet.

9) Talk of deadlines would undercut the morale of our troops.



But consider this:

1) On civil war. Iraqis are already fighting Iraqis. Insurgents have killed far more Iraqis than Americans. That’s civil war. We created the civil war when we invaded; we can’t prevent a civil war by staying.

For those who really worry about destabilizing the region, the sensible policy is not to stay the course in Iraq. It is rapid withdrawal, re-establishing strong relations with our allies in Europe, showing confidence in the UN Security Council, and trying to knit together a large coalition including the major states of Europe, Japan, South Korea, China, and India to back a strategy for stabilizing the area from the eastern Mediterranean to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Until the United States withdraws from Iraq and admits its strategic error, no such coalition can be formed.

Thus those who fear leaving a mess are actually helping make things worse while preventing a new strategic approach with some promise of success.


2) On credibility. If we were Russia or some other insecure nation, we might have to worry about credibility. A hyperpower need not worry about credibility. That’s one of the great advantages of being a hyperpower: When we have made a big strategic mistake, we can reverse it. And it may even enhance our credibility. Staying there damages our credibility more than leaving.


Ask the president if he really worries about US credibility. Or, what will happen to our credibility if the course he is pursuing proves to be a major strategic disaster? Would it not be better for our long-term credibility to withdraw earlier than later in this event?


3) On the insurgency and democracy. There is no question the insurgents and other anti-American parties will take over the government once we leave. But that will happen no matter how long we stay. Any government capable of holding power in Iraq will be anti-American, because the Iraqi people are increasingly becoming anti-American.

Also, the U.S. will not leave behind a liberal, constitutional democracy in Iraq no matter how long it stays. Holding elections is easy. It is impossible to make it a constitutional democracy in a hurry.

President Bush’s statements about progress in Iraq are increasingly resembling LBJ's statements during the Vietnam War. For instance, Johnson’s comments about the 1968 election are very similar to what Bush said in February 2005 after the election of a provisional parliament.

Ask the president: Why should we expect a different outcome in Iraq than in Vietnam?

Ask the president if he intends to leave a pro-American liberal regime in place. Because that’s just impossible. Postwar Germany and Japan are not models for Iraq. Each had mature (at least a full generation old) constitutional orders by the end of the 19th century. They both endured as constitutional orders until the 1930s. Thus General Clay and General MacArthur were merely reversing a decade and a half totalitarianism -- returning to nearly a century of liberal political change in Japan and a much longer period in Germany.


Imposing a liberal constitutional order in Iraq would be to accomplish something that has never been done before. Of all the world's political cultures, an Arab-Muslim one may be the most resistant to such a change of any in the world. Even the Muslim society in Turkey (an anti-Arab society) stands out for being the only example of a constitutional order in an Islamic society, and even it backslides occasionally.


4) On terrorists. Iraq is already a training ground for terrorists. In fact, the CIA has pointed out to the administration and congress that Iraq is spawning so many terrorists that they are returning home to many other countries to further practice their skills there. The quicker a new dictator wins the political power in Iraq and imposes order, the sooner the country will stop producing well-experienced terrorists.


Why not ask: "Mr. President, since you and the vice president insisted that Saddam's Iraq supported al Qaeda -- which we now know it did not -- isn't your policy in Iraq today strengthening al Qaeda's position in that country?"


5) On Iranian influence. Iranian leaders see US policy in Iraq as being so much in Teheran's interests that they have been advising Iraqi Shiite leaders to do exactly what the Americans ask them to do. Elections will allow the Shiites to take power legally. Once in charge, they can settle scores with the Baathists and Sunnis. If US policy in Iraq begins to undercut Iran's interests, then Teheran can use its growing influence among Iraqi Shiites to stir up trouble, possibly committing Shiite militias to an insurgency against US forces there. The US invasion has vastly increased Iran's influence in Iraq, not sealed it out.


Questions for the administration: "Why do the Iranians support our presence in Iraq today? Why do they tell the Shiite leaders to avoid a sectarian clash between Sunnis and Shiites? Given all the money and weapons they provide Shiite groups, why are they not stirring up more trouble for the US? Will Iranian policy change once a Shiite majority has the reins of government? Would it not be better to pull out now rather than to continue our present course of weakening the Sunnis and Baathists, opening the way for a Shiite dictatorship?"


6) On Iraq’s neighbors. The civil war we leave behind may well draw in Syria, Turkey and Iran. But already today each of those states is deeply involved in support for or opposition to factions in the ongoing Iraqi civil war. The very act of invading Iraq almost insured that violence would involve the larger region. And so it has and will continue, with, or without, US forces in Iraq.


7) On Shiite-Sunni conflict. The US presence is not preventing Shiite-Sunni conflict; it merely delays it. Iran is preventing it today, and it will probably encourage it once the Shiites dominate the new government, an outcome US policy virtually ensures.


8) On training the Iraq military and police. The insurgents are fighting very effectively without US or European military advisors to train them. Why don't the soldiers and police in the present Iraqi regime's service do their duty as well? Because they are uncertain about committing their lives to this regime. They are being asked to take a political stand, just as the insurgents are. Political consolidation, not military-technical consolidation, is the issue.


The issue is not military training; it is institutional loyalty. We trained the Vietnamese military effectively. Its generals took power and proved to be lousy politicians and poor fighters in the final showdown. In many battles over a decade or more, South Vietnamese military units fought very well, defeating VC and NVA units. But South Vietnam's political leaders lost the war.


Even if we were able to successfully train an Iraqi military and police force, the likely result, after all that, would be another military dictatorship. Experience around the world teaches us that military dictatorships arise when the military’s institutional modernization gets ahead of political consolidation.


9) On not supporting our troops by debating an early pullout. Many US officers in Iraq, especially at company and field grade levels, know that while they are winning every tactical battle, they are losing strategically. And according to the New York Times last week, they are beginning to voice complaints about Americans at home bearing none of the pains of the war. One can only guess about the enlisted ranks, but those on a second tour – probably the majority today – are probably anxious for an early pullout. It is also noteworthy that US generals in Iraq are not bubbling over with optimistic reports they way they were during the first few years of the war in Vietnam. Their careful statements and caution probably reflect serious doubts that they do not, and should not, express publicly. The more important question is whether or not the repressive and vindictive behavior by the secretary of defense and his deputy against the senior military -- especially the Army leadership, which is the critical component in the war -- has made it impossible for field commanders to make the political leaders see the facts.


Most surprising to me is that no American political leader today has tried to unmask the absurdity of the administration's case that to question the strategic wisdom of the war is unpatriotic and a failure to support our troops. Most officers and probably most troops don't see it that way. They are angry at the deficiencies in materiel support they get from the Department of Defense, and especially about the irresponsibly long deployments they must now endure because Mr. Rumsfeld and his staff have refused to enlarge the ground forces to provide shorter tours. In the meantime, they know that the defense budget shovels money out the door to maritime forces, SDI, etc., while refusing to increase dramatically the size of the Army.


As I wrote several years ago, "the Pentagon's post-Cold War force structure is so maritime heavy and land force weak that it is firmly in charge of the porpoises and whales while leaving the land to tyrants." The Army, some of the Air Force, the National Guard, and the reserves are now the victims of this gross mismatch between military missions and force structure. Neither the Bush nor the Clinton administration has properly "supported the troops." The media could ask the president why he fails to support our troops by not firing his secretary of defense.



■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■ ■

So why is almost nobody advocating a pullout? I can only speculate. We face a strange situation today where few if any voices among Democrats in Congress will mention early withdrawal from Iraq, and even the one or two who do will not make a comprehensive case for withdrawal now.Why are the Democrats failing the public on this issue today? The biggest reason is because they weren’t willing to raise that issue during the campaign. Howard Dean alone took a clear and consistent stand on Iraq, and the rest of the Democratic party trashed him for it. Most of those in Congress voted for the war and let that vote shackle them later on. Now they are scared to death that the White House will smear them with lack of patriotism if they suggest pulling out.

Journalists can ask all the questions they like but none will prompt a more serious debate as long as no political leaders create the context and force the issues into the open.


I don't believe anyone will be able to sustain a strong case in the short run without going back to the fundamental misjudgment of invading Iraq in the first place. Once the enormity of that error is grasped, the case for pulling out becomes easy to see.


Look at John Kerry's utterly absurd position during the presidential campaign. He said “It’s the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time," but then went on to explain how he expected to win it anyway. Even the voter with no interest in foreign affairs was able to recognize it as an absurdity. If it was the wrong war at the wrong place and time, then it was never in our interest to fight. If that is true, what has changed to make it in our interest? Nothing, absolutely nothing.


The US invasion of Iraq only serves the interest of:


1) Osama bin Laden (it made Iraq safe for al Qaeda, positioned US military personnel in places where al Qaeda operatives can kill them occasionally, helps radicalize youth throughout the Arab and Muslim world, alienates America's most important and strongest allies – the Europeans – and squanders US military resources that otherwise might be finishing off al Qaeda in Pakistan.);


2) The Iranians (who were invaded by Saddam and who suffered massive casualties in an eight year war with Iraq.);


3) And the extremists in both Palestinian and Israeli political circles (who don't really want a peace settlement without the utter destruction of the other side, and probably believe that bogging the United States down in a war in Iraq that will surely become a war between the United States and most of the rest of Arab world gives them the time and cover to wipe out the other side.)


The wisest course for journalists might be to begin sustained investigations of why leading Democrats have failed so miserably to challenge the US occupation of Iraq. The first step, of course, is to establish as conventional wisdom the fact that the war was never in the US interest and has not become so. It is such an obvious case to make that I find it difficult to believe many pundits and political leaders have not already made it repeatedly.



Lieutenant General William E. Odom, U.S. Army (Ret.), is a Senior Fellow with Hudson Institute and a professor at Yale University. He was Director of the National Security Agency from 1985 to 1988. From 1981 to 1985, he served as Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence, the Army's senior intelligence officer. From 1977 to 1981, he was Military Assistant to the President's Assistant for National Security Affairs, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

Republicans Embrace Voter Supression

It is fascinating that Republicans are obsessive about the possibility that someone who shouldn't be allowed to vote does, yet they are cavalier about a legitimate vote not getting counted. It makes the republicans look extremely hypocritical. Here in Shelby County, the republican party is opposed to voting machines which provide a paper trail and they don't really have a justification why. But the Republican party specializes in voter suppression. Think back to 2004 election and voters in democratic and minority districts being forced to wait hours to vote. Beloved former Chief Justice William Rhenquist became famous in republican circles by actively working in the early to mid 1960's to suppress minority voting in Arizona. Now Georgia is doing this. It is especially repugnant after RNC chairman Ken Mehlman apologized for the Southern Strategy. I guess republicans aren't too sorry for it.


Criticism of Voting Law Was Overruled
Justice Dept. Backed Georgia Measure Despite Fears of Discrimination

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, November 17, 2005; Page A01

A team of Justice Department lawyers and analysts who reviewed a Georgia voter-identification law recommended rejecting it because it was likely to discriminate against black voters, but they were overruled the next day by higher-ranking officials at Justice, according to department documents.

The Justice Department has characterized the "pre-clearance" of the controversial Georgia voter-identification program as a joint decision by career and political appointees in the Civil Rights Division. Republican proponents in Georgia have cited federal approval of the program as evidence that it would not discriminate against African Americans and other minorities.

But an Aug. 25 staff memo obtained by The Washington Post recommended blocking the program because Georgia failed to show that the measure would not dilute the votes of minority residents, as required under the Voting Rights Act.

The memo, endorsed by four of the team's five members, also said the state had provided flawed and incomplete data. The team found significant evidence that the plan would be "retrogressive," meaning that it would reduce blacks' access to the polls.

A day later, on Aug. 26, the chief of the department's voting rights section, John Tanner, told Georgia officials that the program could go forward. "The Attorney General does not interpose any objection to the specified changes," he said in a letter to them.

Eric Holland, a Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement this week that "disagreements are healthy in a debate" and that voting rights decisions are made "after reviewing both the pros and cons very carefully."

"At the end of the day, the section chief is responsible for tendering a recommendation" to the assistant attorney general for civil rights, he said.

The Georgia voter ID program has been the subject of fierce partisan debate since it was approved by the state's Republican-controlled legislature in March. The plan was blocked on constitutional grounds in October by a U.S. District Court judge, who compared the measure to a Jim Crow-era poll tax. A three-judge appellate panel, made up of one Democratic and two Republican appointees, upheld the lower court's injunction.

The program requires voters to obtain one of six forms of photo identification before going to the polls, as opposed to 17 types of identification currently allowed. Those without a driver's license or other photo identification are required to obtain a special digital identification card, which would cost $20 for five years and could be obtained from motor vehicle offices in only 59 of the state's 159 counties.

Proponents said the measure was needed to combat voter fraud, but opponents charged that Republicans were trying to keep black voters, who tend to vote Democratic, away from the polls.

Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 requires Georgia and eight other states, mostly in the South, to submit any voting rule changes that might affect minority groups to the Justice Department for review. The department can either halt the proposed changes with an objection or issue a "pre-clearance" letter allowing them to proceed. Portions of the act, including Section 5, are up for renewal in Congress, and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales has said that he supports reauthorizing the law.

The Justice Department's decision to approve the Georgia measure was the latest in a series of disputes within the Civil Rights Division, which lost nearly 20 percent of its lawyers in 2005 and has assigned dozens of those who remain to handle immigration cases instead of civil rights litigation. In the voting rights section, which handles election-related issues such as the Georgia plan, political appointees also overruled career lawyers in approving GOP-backed redistricting maps in Mississippi and Texas in recent years, current and former employees have said.

The Voting Rights Act puts the legal burden on Georgia to show that proposed election-related changes would not be retrogressive. According to the Aug. 25 memo from the Justice review team, Georgia lawmakers and state officials made little effort to research the possible racial impact of the proposed program.

The 51-page memo recommended several steps that Georgia could take to make the ID program fairer to minority voters, such as continuing to allow the use of non-photo identification, such as birth certificates and Social Security cards, that have not been shown to pose security problems.

Those in favor of issuing an objection were Robert Berman, deputy chief of the voting rights section; Amy Zubrensky, a trial lawyer; Heather Moss, a civil rights analyst; and Toby Moore, a geographer, according to the memo. A fifth member of the team, trial lawyer Joshua Rogers, recommended approval, but the memo does not include his reasoning.

Berman did not return a call made to his office.

A key area of disagreement between the staff and their supervisors appears to be the reliability of data provided by the Georgia Department of Driver Services and other state agencies.

The staff memo noted that the records were riddled with errors, including the unexpired licenses of dead people, and were "of a quality far below what we are accustomed to using in the Voting Section." And other sources, including the U.S. Census Bureau, showed that Georgia blacks were much less likely than whites to own vehicles and also less likely to have photo IDs, the memo said.

"While no single piece of data confirms that blacks will [be] disparately impacted compared to whites, the totality of the evidence points to that conclusion," the memo said. It added later: "The state has failed to meet its burden of demonstrating that the change is not retrogressive."

But Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella cited the state's data in an Oct. 7 letter to a senator that argues the number of eligible voters without a photo ID is "extremely small."

"All individual data indicates that the state's African-American citizens are, if anything, slightly more likely than white citizens to possess one of the necessary forms of identification," Moschella wrote to Sen. Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.) in defense of the department's decision.

State Sen. Bill Stephens, a Republican who helped win passage of the legislation, said the Justice Department's approval was vital because of the restrictions faced by Georgia under the Voting Rights Act.

"That is the most crucial part of any elections legislation we pass," said Stephens, who is a candidate for secretary of state. "We know we have to await the Justice Department's pre-clearance of virtually anything we do."

State Rep. Tyrone L. Brooks Sr., a Democrat and president of the Georgia Association of Black Elected Officials, said he was not surprised by the Justice Department's position in the case.

"Some of my colleagues told me early on that, because of politics in the Bush administration, no matter what the staff recommendation was, this would be approved by the attorney general," Brooks said. "It's disappointing that the staff recommendation was not accepted, because that has been the norm since 1965."

Bush's Attack of War Critics Isn't Going to Work

I watched parts of Bush's speech responding to war critics on the news Friday. I was almost shocked that this was the tactic he was using to try to shore up support. Bush turning criticism of the war into a partisan battle just isn't going to win back any support he's already lost. Several prominent Democrats have said they were wrong to vote for the war. So this automatically makes them more credible than Bush. Plus, just today Republican Senators tried to easy the administration into outlining a withdrawal strategy starting next year before the mid-term elections.
There is a saying in politics that if you don't understand someone's motivations, then you are standing in the wrong place. If I try to put myself in Bush's place, I really shouldn't be shocked by the statements. All he and Rove know are hard driving partisan attacks. I guess he is trying to hold onto that last die hard 36%. If he does admit mistakes he'd even lose them and it wouldn't help him get back any support he's already lost. So I guess it more just plowing ahead. The republicans are going to get waxed in the 2006 election.


Another Set of Scare Tactics

By E. J. Dionne Jr.

Mr. President, it won't work this time.

With a Wall Street Journal/NBC News Poll finding 57 percent of Americans agreeing that George W. Bush "deliberately misled people to make the case for war with Iraq," the president clearly needs to tend to his credibility problems. But his partisan attacks on the administration's critics, in a Veterans Day speech last week and in Alaska yesterday, will only add to his troubles.

Bush was not subtle. He said that anyone accusing his administration of having "manipulated the intelligence and misled the American people" was giving aid and comfort to the enemy. "These baseless attacks send the wrong signal to our troops and to an enemy that is questioning America's will," Bush declared last week. "As our troops fight a ruthless enemy determined to destroy our way of life, they deserve to know that their elected leaders who voted to send them to war continue to stand behind them."

You wonder: Did Patrick Fitzgerald, the special counsel in the Valerie Plame leak investigation, send the wrong signal to our troops and our enemy by daring to seek the indictment of Scooter Libby on a charge of perjury and obstruction of justice? Must Americans who support our troops desist from any criticism of the use of intelligence by the administration?

There is a great missing element in the argument over whether the administration manipulated the facts. Neither side wants to talk about the context in which Bush won a blank check from Congress to invade Iraq. He doesn't want us to remember that he injected the war debate into the 2002 midterm election campaign for partisan purposes, and he doesn't want to acknowledge that he used the post-Sept. 11 mood to do all he could to intimidate Democrats from raising questions more of them should have raised.

The big difference between our current president and his father is that the first President Bush put off the debate over the Persian Gulf War until after the 1990 midterm elections. The result was one of most substantive and honest foreign policy debates Congress has ever seen, and a unified nation. The first President Bush was scrupulous about keeping petty partisanship out of the discussion.

The current President Bush did the opposite. He pressured Congress for a vote before the 2002 election, and the war resolution passed in October.

Sen. Joe Biden, a Delaware Democrat who is no dove, warned of rushing "pell-mell" into an endorsement of broad war powers for the president. The Los Angeles Times reported that Sen. Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, protested in September: "We're being asked to go to war, and vote on it in a matter of days. We need an intelligence estimate before we can seriously vote." And Rep. Tom Lantos, a California Democrat, put it plainly: "This will be one of the most important decisions Congress makes in a number of years; I do not believe it should be made in the frenzy of an election year." But it was.

Grand talk about liberating Iraq gave way to cheap partisan attacks. In New Mexico, Republican Steve Pearce ran an advertisement against Democrat John Arthur Smith declaring: "While Smith 'reflects' on the situation, the possibility of a mushroom cloud hovering over a U.S. city still remains." Note that Smith wasn't being attacked for opposing the war, only for reflecting on it. God forbid that any Democrat dare even think before going to war.

Marc Racicot, then chairman of the Republican National Committee, said about the late Sen. Paul Wellstone's opposition to the war resolution: "He has set about to diminish the capacity of this nation to defend itself. That is a legitimate issue." Wellstone, who died in a plane crash a few days before the election, was not intimidated. But other Democrats were.

The bad faith of Bush's current argument is staggering. He wants to say that the "more than a hundred Democrats in the House and Senate" who "voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power" thereby gave up their right to question his use of intelligence forever after. But he does not want to acknowledge that he forced the war vote to take place under circumstances that guaranteed the minimum amount of reflection and debate, and that opened anyone who dared question his policies to charges, right before an election, that they were soft on Hussein.

By linking the war on terrorism to a partisan war against Democrats, Bush undercut his capacity to lead the nation in this fight. And by resorting to partisan attacks again last week, Bush only reminded us of the shameful circumstances in which the whole thing started.

Alito's True Beliefs

The LA Times has this article about what Alito said to get a promotion in the Reagan Administration. It will be extremely difficult for him to run away from these statements, but I'm sure arch-conservatives will come up with some lame excuses. Democrats should fight hard against Alito's nomination. They shouldn't mention filibuster between now and the Senate floor vote, but prepared to use it. Who knows what things will befall this nomination, the republicans in congress or the President between now and January.


Old Job Form, New Questions
Alito, pushing for a promotion in 1985, cited his work against racial quotas and his view that the right to an abortion isn't in the Constitution.

By Richard A. Serrano and David G. Savage, Times Staff Writers


WASHINGTON — Supreme Court nominee Samuel A. Alito Jr., once seeking to advance his career as a Reagan White House lawyer, described himself as a dedicated conservative and said he was "particularly proud" of his attempts to end racial and ethnic quotas and establish that the Constitution did not give women a right to abortion.

In a 1985 application for a high-level political appointment in the Department of Justice, Alito portrayed himself as strictly conservative and strongly partisan. That contrasts with the picture of Alito that has emerged from his 15 years as a federal appeals court judge, where he has come across in legal opinions and in descriptions by colleagues and friends as lacking a clear ideology but devoted to faithfully interpreting the law.

The statement of Alito's political views, though two decades old, reenergized liberal activists and gave Senate Democrats a new reason to challenge the nomination, which had been gaining momentum.

It raised questions as to whether Alito still held those beliefs or whether he had perhaps embellished his views to promote himself in Republican circles. Neither explanation was likely to work in his favor with some moderates or liberals.

Senators said Alito's statement ensured that he would be questioned pointedly on those issues when his confirmation hearings begin Jan. 9.

"I think that it is more reason to question him closely at the hearing," said Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), citing specifically Alito's statement that the Constitution "does not protect a right to an abortion."

"A lot of people have shifted their views," Specter said. "People do shift, so there may be an evolution of his thinking."

Alito's comments were first reported Monday by the Washington Times. His job application was among some 160 pages of material from Alito's government career that were released later in the day by the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library near Simi Valley.

At the time of his job application, Alito had been working for four years in the solicitor general's office, mostly handling appellate matters.

But with his eye on the job as deputy assistant attorney general, Alito proclaimed his "philosophical commitment to the policies" of the Reagan administration.

"I am and always have been a conservative and an adherent to the same philosophical views that I believe are central to this administration," Alito began.

He took aim at liberal rulings of the Supreme Court under Chief Justice Earl Warren in the 1960s, and recalled being heavily influenced by conservative commentator William F. Buckley Jr. and by the 1964 presidential campaign of conservative icon Sen. Barry Goldwater of Arizona.

While saying it was "obviously very difficult" to summarize a set of political views, Alito wrote:

"I believe very strongly in limited government, federalism, free enterprise, the supremacy of the elected branches of government, the need for a strong defense and effective law enforcement, and the legitimacy of a government role in protecting traditional values."

In the field of law, he said, "I disagree strenuously with the usurpation by the judiciary of decision-making authority that should be exercised by the branches of government responsible to the electorate."

Alito said he had found it "an honor and source of personal satisfaction" to work for President Reagan and "to help to advance legal positions in which I personally believe very strongly. I am particularly proud of my contributions in recent cases in which the government has argued in the Supreme Court that racial and ethnic quotas should not be allowed and that the Constitution does not protect a right to an abortion."

Finally, Alito said he was a "lifelong registered Republican and [had] made the sort of modest political contributions that a federal employee can afford to Republican candidates and conservative causes." He listed the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Conservative Political Action Committee, as well as national GOP officeholders from his home state of New Jersey.

His comments were characterized by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), an influential member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as "extreme statements" that were "deeply troubling." Kennedy also accused Alito of "clearly trying to pass a litmus test to get a promotion in an administration that stood against the march of progress in this country."

Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York, another Democratic panel member, said Alito "should expect tough questioning from the committee about whether his views have changed and whether he would advance a particular ideological position that is contrary to decades of legal precedent."

Schumer added: "Past nominees have said they could not discuss these issues for fear of creating a perception of bias. Here, unfortunately, the memo itself creates the perception of bias, and it will be crucial for this nominee to address the issue head-on."

But Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, a Republican committee member, said the question was whether Alito would set apart his own views and "base his rulings on what the Constitution says."

"His long track record as a federal appeals court judge shows that he has indeed put his personal views on abortion aside, and I have every confidence he will continue to do so if he is confirmed to United States Supreme Court."

Alito was applying for a job as the top deputy in the Justice Department office that provides legal advice to the attorney general and to the White House.

"I had recruited him to be my deputy," said Charles J. Cooper, a well-known Washington lawyer who headed the Office of Legal Counsel during the Reagan administration.

"Sam had impressed me as an extraordinarily gifted lawyer," Cooper said. "He was careful and rigorous. He didn't come across as an open and obvious conservative activist, like me, for example."

But the job application was a means of telling the Reagan White House that he shared their political aims, Cooper said.

"I think this is much ado about very little. How could someone be shocked that a young lawyer interested in a political position in the Reagan administration was a conservative?" Cooper asked.

Alito's statement that the Constitution does not protect a right to abortion will likely get the most attention in his Senate hearings.

Alito served in the solicitor general's office when the Reagan administration urged the Supreme Court to overturn Roe vs. Wade. However, his record as a judge is more equivocal.

In 1991, he voted to uphold a series of antiabortion restrictions passed by the Pennsylvania Legislature, including a rule that generally required married women to notify their husbands before having an abortion. The high court later voided that regulation.

But in three other abortion-related cases, Alito voted against the wishes of antiabortion advocates. In one ruling, he cast the deciding vote in a Medicaid case that made it easier for poor women to obtain free abortions if they were victims of rape or incest.

Alito's comments about the Warren court are also likely to get the attention of Senate Democrats.

As a college student, Alito said, he developed an interest in constitutional law, "motivated in large part by disagreement with the Warren court decisions, particularly in the areas of criminal procedure, the establishment clause and reapportionment."

The Miranda decision limiting police questioning caused lasting controversy, as did the earlier rulings banning school-sponsored prayers. But the furor over reapportionment had faded by the 1970s.

In the 1960s, the Warren court adopted one-person, one-vote and said electoral districts in states and in cities had to be roughly equal in size. Before that, thinly populated rural areas had as much or more clout than cities in some states.

Republicans Even Shaking Down Foriegn Governments

Republicans have inventive ways of fundraising. Abramhoff finds a government wanting to have a meeting with the President but only if it passes $9 million. I'm sure Abramoff would have taken his substantial finders fee and then funneled the rest into Delay's TRMPAC and the RNC. Here's the story.

Democrats Seek Documents on Lobbyist and Bush Meeting
By PHILIP SHENON
WASHINGTON, Nov. 11 - House Democratic leaders called on the White House on Friday to release documents showing whether a powerful Republican lobbyist had a role in arranging an Oval Office meeting last year between President Bush and the president of the West African nation of Gabon, whose government had been asked by the lobbyist to pay $9 million to help arrange such a meeting.

In a letter to the White House counsel's office, the House Democratic leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, and the senior Democrat on the Government Reform Committee, Representative Henry A. Waxman of California, said they wanted copies of "all records relating to any connections between White House staff" and the lobbyist, Jack Abramoff, "regarding a visit by representatives of Gabon."

The White House and the State Department have said that the meeting with President Omar Bongo of Gabon on May 26, 2004, was routine and that there was no evidence of any involvement by Mr. Abramoff.

"However," Ms. Pelosi and Mr. Waxman wrote, "it is impossible for Congress and the public to assess this assertion without further documentation from the White House."

The White House has said the meeting had special importance because Gabon held the presidency of the United Nations General Assembly last year and because of the Bush administration's interest in AIDS prevention in Africa. The Gabon Embassy in Washington has not responded to written questions from The New York Times about the meeting.

A spokeswoman for Mr. Abramoff, who is under indictment in Florida and under investigation by a federal grand jury in Washington, would not discuss the lobbyist's approach to President Bongo, whose government has often been criticized by the State Department as having a poor record on human rights.

The White House had no comment Friday on whether it would release documents to the House Democrats, who also requested material from the State Department about President Bongo's meeting.

A White House spokesman, Trent Duffy, said, "President Bush met with President Bongo because he believes in good U.S.-Africa relations, and if Democrats question that, that's their business."

Mr. Abramoff's contacts with Gabon were disclosed last week when the Senate Indian Affairs Committee, which is investigating his lobbying for Indian tribes and their gambling operations, released hundreds of pages of documents from his files, including a July 2003 letter in which Mr. Abramoff wrote to President Bongo to urge Gabon to hire him as a lobbyist.

Other documents obtained by The Times show that Mr. Abramoff and his colleagues drew up a draft contract in August 2003 that called for Gabon to pay $9 million for a "public relations effort related to promoting Gabon and securing a visit for President Bongo with the president of the United States."

There is no evidence in the public record to show that Mr. Abramoff completed a contract with Gabon or received any money from it.

Who's Rewriting History Mr. Bush

Asterisks Dot White House's Iraq Argument

By Dana Milbank and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, November 12, 2005; Page A01

President Bush and his national security adviser have answered critics of the Iraq war in recent days with a two-pronged argument: that Congress saw the same intelligence the administration did before the war, and that independent commissions have determined that the administration did not misrepresent the intelligence.

Neither assertion is wholly accurate.

The administration's overarching point is true: Intelligence agencies overwhelmingly believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and very few members of Congress from either party were skeptical about this belief before the war began in 2003. Indeed, top lawmakers in both parties were emphatic and certain in their public statements.

But Bush and his aides had access to much more voluminous intelligence information than did lawmakers, who were dependent on the administration to provide the material. And the commissions cited by officials, though concluding that the administration did not pressure intelligence analysts to change their conclusions, were not authorized to determine whether the administration exaggerated or distorted those conclusions.

National security adviser Stephen J. Hadley, briefing reporters Thursday, countered "the notion that somehow this administration manipulated the intelligence." He said that "those people who have looked at that issue, some committees on the Hill in Congress, and also the Silberman-Robb Commission, have concluded it did not happen."

But the only committee investigating the matter in Congress, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, has not yet done its inquiry into whether officials mischaracterized intelligence by omitting caveats and dissenting opinions. And Judge Laurence H. Silberman, chairman of Bush's commission on weapons of mass destruction, said in releasing his report on March 31, 2005: "Our executive order did not direct us to deal with the use of intelligence by policymakers, and all of us were agreed that that was not part of our inquiry."

Bush, in Pennsylvania yesterday, was more precise, but he still implied that it had been proved that the administration did not manipulate intelligence, saying that those who suggest the administration "manipulated the intelligence" are "fully aware that a bipartisan Senate investigation found no evidence of political pressure to change the intelligence community's judgments."

In the same speech, Bush asserted that "more than 100 Democrats in the House and the Senate, who had access to the same intelligence, voted to support removing Saddam Hussein from power." Giving a preview of Bush's speech, Hadley had said that "we all looked at the same intelligence."

But Bush does not share his most sensitive intelligence, such as the President's Daily Brief, with lawmakers. Also, the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing the intelligence community's views about the threat from Iraq was given to Congress just days before the vote to authorize the use of force in that country.

In addition, there were doubts within the intelligence community not included in the NIE. And even the doubts expressed in the NIE could not be used publicly by members of Congress because the classified information had not been cleared for release. For example, the NIE view that Hussein would not use weapons of mass destruction against the United States or turn them over to terrorists unless backed into a corner was cleared for public use only a day before the Senate vote.

The lawmakers are partly to blame for their ignorance. Congress was entitled to view the 92-page National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq before the October 2002 vote. But, as The Washington Post reported last year, no more than six senators and a handful of House members read beyond the five-page executive summary.

Even within the Bush administration, not everybody consistently viewed Iraq as what Hadley called "an enormous threat." In a news conference in February 2001 in Egypt, then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said of the economic sanctions against Hussein's Iraq: "Frankly, they have worked. He has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction."

Bush, in his speech Friday, said that "it is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began." But in trying to set the record straight, he asserted: "When I made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein from power, Congress approved it with strong bipartisan support."

The October 2002 joint resolution authorized the use of force in Iraq, but it did not directly mention the removal of Hussein from power.

The resolution voiced support for diplomatic efforts to enforce "all relevant Security Council resolutions," and for using the armed forces to enforce the resolutions and defend "against the continuing threat posed by Iraq."

Hadley, in his remarks, went further. "Congress, in 1998, authorized, in fact, the use of force based on that intelligence," he said. "And, as you know, the Clinton administration took some action."

But the 1998 legislation gave the president authority "to support efforts to remove the regime of Saddam Hussein" by providing assistance to Iraqi opposition groups, including arms, humanitarian aid and broadcasting facilities.

President Bill Clinton ordered four days of bombing of Iraqi weapons facilities in 1998, under the 1991 resolution authorizing military force in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Describing that event in an interview with CBS News yesterday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said: "We went to war in 1998 because of concerns about his weapons of mass destruction."

Abortion Politics

I looked at a Survey USA poll of all states on the issue of abortion done 9-15-05. Only 13 states have a pro-life majority. Here's the list of what states they are. Utah, Louisiana, Arkansas, Idaho, Alabama, Mississippi, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, Indiana, South Dakota, Missouri, and Oklahoma. (They are all fine states that lead the nation in low poverty, low divorce rate, high qualities of education, low infant mortality, and standards of living. NOT!) The poll stated that the Weighted average was that the American public was 38% pro-life, 56% pro-choice.('Weighted Average' means each state is weighted proportionally to its share of USA population. For example,California, the most populated state, is given 71 times the weight of WY the least populated state, in a weighted avg.)Unweighted average is 41% pro-life, 54% pro-choice.('Unweighted Average' means each state is given equal weight; population density is not taken into account).

Here is the link to the survey:
http://www.surveyusa.com/50State2005/50StateAbortion0805SortedbyProLife.htm

American politics have been split since the Abortion issue was primarily settled in the court with Roe vs. Wade. Because it was settled in the courts rather than in the political arena, conservatives have been battling to stack the court system with pro-life judges. It has also caused social conservatives to form a political coalition with economic conservatives. Thomas Frank discusses how the pro-life movement is willing to sacrifice the economic well-being of its members to advance the pro-life cause in "What's the Matter with Kansas?" Now social conservatives are getting close to getting a pro-life majority on the Supreme Court, but economic conservatives and social moderate republicans are less than enthusiastic. They know that if the abortion is overturned and social conservatives get their way, the republican coalition is shattered. In addition, pro-choice forces will be mobilized and single females will turn out and vote democratic for a generation. So it is in the economically conservative and social socially moderate republicans to never resolve the abortion issue. Perpetual abortion political warfare is their goal.

What should Democrats do? Well, they should shatter the republican party by calling for a national referendum on abortion. Lets settle the issue politically by a vote. No more talk about "activist judges", no more code speak and references to Dread Scott. Put the referendum on the 2006 midterm ballot. Let the will of the people speak. If the majority wants pro-choice laws, than we will all know the pro-life judges are the "activists judges."

Come on republicans, let's take the Pepsi challenge and resolve the Abortion issue now. What's more American than voting. Unless of course, you know you will lose. Which is exactly what will happen.

John Edwards

I'm a John Edwards fan. He didn't come from a wealthy family and attended a state university. (Fuck the Ivy League. They aren't so special. Hell, George W. Bush went to Harvard and Yale.) His message in the 2004 campaign of "two Americas" was excellent. During the campaign people understood it but it was drowned out by terrorism and Iraq. After Katrina though, the "two Americas" message carries extra weight. Now Edwards is addressing the Iraq War. Here's what he says about his vote for it in 2002.

In an interview after the UNC speech, Edwards finally utters the words he'd assiduously avoided during the last campaign: "I voted for the resolution," he says. "It was a mistake." So far, so good. But he goes on, "The hard question is, What do you do now? Looking back, it's easy to say that it was wrong and based on false information. Anybody who doesn't admit that isn't honest, and that's the truth." So what now? "I myself feel conflicted about it," Edwards replies. "But we have to find ways--and I don't mean just yanking all the troops tomorrow--but we have to find ways to start bringing our troops home. Our presence there is clearly contributing to the problem." So does he agree with Senator Russ Feingold that Washington should set a withdrawal deadline? "No. Even if we're going to say that internally, that we're gonna have our troops out by X date, there's no reason to announce that to the world. I think that's probably a mistake." He doesn't agree, either, with Senator Clinton's call for more US troops to finish the job? "No sir!" Edwards says, sitting straight up in his chair. "Did she really say that?"

I still don't completely agree with Edwards. I believe Feingold's position is better. Giving a withdrawal date makes the Iraqi's start preparing for American troops not being there. If the Iraqi government knows the Americans will not be there to protect them, I'm sure they will be much more motivated to develope security forces and come to political agreements just for self-preservation.
I am hopefull for the 2008 election. Clark, Edwards, Schweitzer, Warner, Feingold, and Richardson are all candidates I'd support. As for Biden and Clinton, I am absolutely certain not to be supporting either of them. Biden is a pompous ass owned by MBNA. Clinton has gone around the bend on Iraq and no matter how conservative she acts she will still be a polarizing figure that would unite the Republican base.

David Brooks Is the Whitest and Dumbest Columnist in America

He is a gem of insight from my favorite Bobo in paradise.
"One of the striking things about the scenes from France is how thoroughly the rioters have assimilated hip-hop and rap culture. It's not only that they use the same hand gestures as American rappers, wear the same clothes and necklaces, play the same video games, and sit with the same sorts of car stereos at full blast. It's that they seem to have adopted the same poses of exaggerated manhood, the same attitudes about women, money and the police. They seem to have replicated the same sort of gang culture, the same romantic visions of gunslinging drug dealers."

It is amazing that Brooks is so willing to display his complete cluelessness to the world on the editorial pages of the New York Times. Just in case you need a reminder of what a bobo is, it is a bourgeois bohemian living in the suburbs. I guess this bohemian suburb exists some where, but I think it is most likely just a figment of his imagination. Since Brooks is just pulling this drivel about the suburbs out his ass, he can pull some more out to comment on the French riots. I am so glad that someone with such a lack of knowledge or authority of a subject can lecture us all about the hip hop culture of muslim and african immigrants in FRANCE! I can barely type this because it is so rediculous. Brooks is an extra white, 40 something, white man with illusions of grandeur and cultural relevance. He doesn't even write about America with authenticity. Here's a thought Brooks, maybe it just sucks for these French citizens and they are frustrated. It's not like the word "riot" was invented for innercity, black Americans and French Muslims and North African immigrants. (The only connection is of course hip hop music.) Here is a brief list of major riots in 19th century Europe and America:
Luddite riots in England in 1811 1816
Riots and insurrections across Europe in 1848
Draft riots in New York during the civil war
1871 20,000 people die when the Paris Commune ends
What do all these riots have in common. That's right hip hop music. David Brooks, you are a genius!

What An Interesting Story

How much more does the American people need to hear in order to understand the US was misled (lied) into the war in Iraq.

Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Doubts
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.

The document, an intelligence report from February 2002, said it was probable that the prisoner, Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, “was intentionally misleading the debriefers’’ in making claims about Iraqi support for Al Qaeda’s work with illicit weapons.

The document provides the earliest and strongest indication of doubts voiced by American intelligence agencies about Mr. Libi’s credibility. Without mentioning him by name, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state, and other administration officials repeatedly cited Mr. Libi’s information as “credible’’ evidence that Iraq was training Al 8Qaeda members in the use of explosives and illicit weapons.

Among the first and most prominent assertions was one by Mr. Bush, who said in a major speech in Cincinnati in October 2002 that “we’ve learned that Iraq has trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and poisons and gases.’’

The newly declassified portions of the document were made available by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Mr. Levin said the new evidence of early doubts about Mr. Libi’s statements dramatized what he called the Bush administration’s misuse of prewar intelligence to try to justify the war in Iraq. That is an issue that Mr. Levin and other Senate Democrats have been seeking to emphasize, in part by calling attention to the fact that the Republican-led Senate intelligence committee has yet to deliver a promised report, first sought more than two years ago, on the use of prewar intelligence.

An administration official declined to comment on the D.I.A. report on Mr. Libi. But Senate Republicans, put on the defensive when Democrats forced a closed session of the Senate this week to discuss the issue, have been arguing that Republicans were not alone in making prewar assertions about Iraq, illicit weapons and terrorism that have since been discredited.

Mr. Libi, who was captured in Pakistan at the end of 2001, recanted his claims in January 2004. That prompted the C.I.A., a month later, to recall all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the Sept. 11 commission.

Mr. Libi was not alone among intelligence sources later determined to have been fabricating accounts. Among others, an Iraqi exile whose code name was Curveball was the primary source for what proved to be false information about Iraq and mobile biological weapons labs. And American military officials cultivated ties with Ahmad Chalabi, the head of the Iraqi National Congress, an exile group, who has been accused of feeding the Pentagon misleading information in urging war.

The report issued by the Senate intelligence committee in July 2004 questioned whether some versions of intelligence report prepared by the C.I.A. in late 2002 and early 2003 raised sufficient questions about the reliability of Mr. Libi’s claims.

But neither that report nor another issued by the Sept. 11 commission made any reference to the existence of the earlier and more skeptical 2002 report by the D.I.A., which supplies intelligence to military commanders and national security policy makers. As an official intelligence report, labeled DITSUM No. 044-02, the document would have circulated widely within the government, and it would have been available to the C.I.A., the White House, the Pentagon and other agencies. It remains unclear whether the D.I.A. document was provided to the Senate panel.

In outlining reasons for its skepticism, the D.I.A. report noted that Mr. Libi’s claims lacked specific details about the Iraqis involved, the illicit weapons used and the location where the training was to have taken place.

“It is possible he does not know any further details; it is more likely this individual is intentionally misleading the debriefers,’’ the February 2002 report said. “Ibn al-Shaykh has been undergoing debriefs for several weeks and may be describing scenarios to the debriefers that he knows will retain their interest.’’

Mr. Powell relied heavily on accounts provided by Mr. Libi for his speech to the United Nations Security Council on Feb. 5, 2003, saying that he was tracing “the story of a senior terrorist operative telling how Iraq provided training in these weapons to Al Qaeda.’’

At the time of Mr. Powell’s speech, an unclassified statement by the C.I.A. described the reporting, now known to have been from Mr. Libi, as “credible.’’ But Mr. Levin said he had learned that a classified C.I.A. assessment at the time stated “the source was not in a position to know if any training had taken place.’’

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Levin also called attention to a portion of the D.I.A. report that expressed skepticism about the idea of close collaboration between Iraq and Al Qaeda, an idea that was never substantiated by American intelligence but was a pillar of the administration’s prewar claims.

“Saddam’s regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements,’’ the D.I.A. report said in one of two declassified paragraphs. “Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control.’’

The request to declassify the two paragraphs was made on Oct. 18 by Mr. Levin and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee. In an Oct. 26 response, Kathleen P. Turner, chief of the D.I.A.’s office for Congressional affairs, said the agency “can find no reason for it to remain classified.’’

At the time of his capture, Mr. Libi was the most senior Qaeda official in American custody. The D.I.A. document gave no indication of where he was being held, or what interrogation methods were used on him.

Mr. Libi remains in custody, apparently at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where he was sent in 2003, according to government officials.

The Senate intelligence committee is scheduled to meet beginning next week to review draft reports prepared as part of a long-postponed “Phase II’’ of the panel’s review of prewar intelligence on Iraq. At separate briefings for reporters on Friday, Republicans staff members said the writing had long been under way, while Senate Democrats on the committee claimed credit for reinvigorating the process, by forcing the closed session. They said that already nearly complete is a look at whether prewar intelligence accurately predicted the potential for an anti-American insurgency.

Other areas of focus include the role played by the Iraqi National Congress, that of the Pentagon in shaping intelligence assessments, and an examination of whether public statements about Iraq by members of the Bush and Clinton administrations, as well as members of Congress, were substantiated by intelligence available at the time.

What Rethuglicans Really think About Their Conservative Base

This is an excert from a Salon story about Jake Abramoff and former aid to Tom Delay, Mike Scalon. It is good to see what Rethuglican elites really think about social conservatives that do all the grunt work for the Republican Party.

"The wackos get their information through the Christian right, Christian radio, mail, the internet and telephone trees," Scanlon wrote in the memo, which was read into the public record at a hearing of the Senate Indian Affairs Committee. "Simply put, we want to bring out the wackos to vote against something and make sure the rest of the public lets the whole thing slip past them."

Scanlon confessed the source code of recent Republican electoral victories: target religious conservatives, distract everyone else, and then railroad through complex initiatives.

Latest Poll Numbers for Bush

The CBS poll released today had Bush's approval rating at 35%

Here are some more poll results:
U.S. MOST IMPORTANT PROBLEM

Now
War in Iraq 21%
Economy and jobs 17%
Terrorism 5%
Education 4%
Gas/oil crisis 4%
Health care 4%
President Bush 4%

That's right, the President of the United States is one of the biggest problems facing America. Too bad we only have 39 more months of this corrupt dipshit as President.

Argentinean Member of Parliament Sent a Letter to President Bush

translation by Migeru for the European Tribune

LETTER TO BUSH FROM MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT ALICIA CASTRO

With my highest regards
To the President of the United States of America
Mr. George W. Bush
Washington D. C.

Mister President:

A Member of Parliament of the Argentinean Nation. I am one of the 257 representatives of the Argentinean people in Parliament; the second time I got into the Chamber of Deputies half a million citizens voted for me, but I can guarantee that what I will be expressing to you in this letter represents the majority of the Argentinean people.

President Bush:

We do not want you to come to our country. Maybe for diplomatic reasons, our Chancery will not have made you aware how reviled you are by our people. It is not simply that we disagree with your policies, but that you represent a danger to the democracies of South America. Not long ago, at an OAS Summit where you defended interventionism, you dared to mention the name of José de San Martín in your speech. You must know that this father of our nation fought against imperialism and in favour of the unity of South America. The people of San Martin do not want you, Mr. Bush, because you represent neoimperialism, which like in the 19th century is an attempt to dominate regions by means of financial measures or armes actions. We Aregentineans know full well the consequences of the policies that you promote: our country, being immensely rich, was driven to misery by irresponsible leaders who followed each and every of the recipes of the International Monetary Fund. We know that international credit organizations are not neutral and responf to the policies of the United States.

Bolivar's prophecy is fulfilled: "the United States of America seem destined by providence to sow misery in Latin America". We Argentinians have nothing against the American people, but much against the government that has put the largest political and military might in the planet at the service of bloody ambition, which does not doubt to annihilate lives to appropriate someone else's oil, to make money from arms trade and, moreover, to expand its most sinister industry: the one that reconstructs what you destroy. You represent the decadence of Western values. Your people, which used not to tolerate lies in political practice, has to endure your having lied with a bold fade to the entire world regarding the existence of nuclear weapons in Iraq, in order to justify invasion.

The Nobel Peace Prize recently awarded to Mohamed ElBaradei, who revealed the existence of these deceptions, is an eloquent display of the importance that the international community attaches to Truth in the construction of Peace. The theory of "pre-emptive war", one of the distasteful novelties in your political discourse, places your government outside any known law and presently threatens concretely Iran, North Korea, Venezuela and Cuba, in sum, the whole world. You threaten us, but you do not confound us. You do not fool us with your proclaimed "war on terrorism", while you practice state terrorism. This is borne out by the tortures at the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons, the distraught mothers of American soldiers taking part in the carnage or women and children in Iraq, and the advances to militarize and control our region. You are a terrorist protecting other terrorists such as Luis Posada Carriles, escaped from a Caracas prison and who, among other crimes, has confessed his authorship of the explosion, in 1976, of a Cuban airliner causing 73 deaths.

Spare us your undesirable presence. We do not share anything that can be debated at the Summit of the Americas, to be held the next 4 and 5 November in the city of Mar del Plata. No government supporting your policies could guarantee its own stability. We the peoples of South America have already chosen. We choose Energy sovereignty: we want Petrosur; we need to recover our Food sovereignty, and for that, American companies must stop infecting our seeds with their pesticides and their trademarks; we reject your patents which leave our sick without a cure; we do not want your dangerous "Open Skies". Do not come here to promote the FTAA, we do not want your "free trade" from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, we choose our solidary and fair trade to complement and benefit the peoples of South America. We have already constituted the South America Confederation of Nations: larger and wealthier than the United States, which we shall unify following the ideals of San Martín, Bolivar, of O¹Higgins, of Artigas, of Martí.

Your values, Mr. Bush, are not vithin our scale of values nor are your aims compatible with out principles. We have our own South Agenda: we foster a Latin American Monetary Fund, a South Bank, a gread South University; we want to inform ourselves from the south and for the south. Unearth already, the antennas of CNN and your international machinery of lies, spare us your crude conspiracies. Your govennment, which rejected the Kyoto protocol, and your terrible management which drowned your own people in New Orleans, represents a concrete threat to the environment and to planet Earth. We South Americans are for the happiness, freedom and life of peoples, we are also for peace. You are on the side of war, of predation and of death. Regarding practical matters, responsibly and as a national representative, I consider it evident that nobody could guarantee your safety in Argentina. Not yours, nor that of our citizens. Proof of this is that Argentina has suffered terrible terrorist attacks which remain unpunished and unsolved. Today terrorism travels on public transportation and the vengeful threat that you profess like a dogma, has already cost the lives of worker and users of public transport in Madrid and London, and has made unsafe such disparate places as Roma, Bali, Miami and New York. I ask you in the name of the Argentinean people, that you spare us of these risks; you could make yourself present at the Summit of the Americas through a tele-conference from Washington which, at the same time, would keep you safe from physical expressions of our repudiation of you.

Awaiting your response, I greet you with distinguished regards.

Alicia Castro
Member of Parliament of the Argentinean Nation