Going Dark

Going Negative: When It Works
By JIM RUTENBERG and KATE ZERNIKE

Published: August 22, 2004

Every campaign cycle, in fact, seems to begin with the promise of an uplifting, mutually respectful debate of the issues, only to devolve into character attacks and distortions, and for good reason: negative ads work. Voters may say they want candidates to stay positive, but in truth, they respond more readily, more viscerally, to attack ads.

"People like a fight," said Roger Stone, a Republican strategist. "Put up an ad about the intricacies of the federal budget and people will turn the channel. Put up an ad like the Swift boat one, that creates an indelible image in the voter's mind."
....
Studies and focus groups have shown that people like ads that are based on policy, factually accurate and that forecast how a candidate would govern, giving them a reason to vote for a candidate - as well as a reason to vote against the opponent.

"Unless people think it's untruthful, you're not going to get a backlash out of it," Ms. Jamieson said. "If people think the source is credible, that the source is speaking out of a deep conviction, you don't get a sense of attack."

The infamous Willie Horton ad, for example, which portrayed Michael Dukakis as weak on crime in 1988, was based in fact and policy - namely, that, while Mr. Dukakis was governor of Massachusetts, felons were let out of prison on weekend furloughs.

And ads from a group calling itself Republicans for Clean Air that slammed Senator John McCain's environmental record and lauded that of Gov. George W. Bush before the crucial New York, California and Ohio Republican primaries in 2000 became the scourge of political watchdog groups. But that does not bother Rob Allyn, whose firm produced them - wholly independently of Mr. Bush's campaign, he adds.

"All I can say is that the day the independent advocacy effort was launched the media was reporting Governor Bush was 8 points behind in New York," he said. "And he won."

If this article is correct, Kerry's new ad (which I haven't seen yet) should be a blockbuster.

Pork, No Beans

Don't Mind If I Do
Congress Says It's Going All Out for the Troops. Here's $8.9 Billion in Pork That Says It's Not.

By Winslow T. Wheeler
Sunday, August 22, 2004; Page B01

We're in the middle of simultaneous wars against terrorism and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the outcomes are anything but certain. To help fight these wars, Congress passed a gigantic $416 billion appropriations bill for the Department of Defense in July, which President Bush signed into law on Aug. 5. The measure, the president declared, ensures that "our armed forces have every tool they need to meet and defeat the threats of our time."

Well, not exactly. If you look at the hidden details of the legislation, it's clear that Congress has failed dismally -- and deliberately -- to fulfill its constitutional mandates to "raise and support armies" and to "provide and maintain a navy."
The Post's opinion and commentary section runs every Sunday.

Legislators have amply demonstrated that what they're really interested in is raising and providing some home-state pork to impress voters in an election year. To that end, they have busied themselves with squeezing funds for war essentials such as training, weapons maintenance and spare parts -- things troops in combat need more, not less, of -- to send extra dollars their constituents' way. And it's equal-opportunity raiding: Both Republicans and Democrats have been fully engaged in this behavior. Even Capitol Hill's self-proclaimed "pork buster," Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who has made a regular practice of calling his colleagues on their gluttony, has essentially given the gorging a wink and a nod.

A pork-hungry Congress has long been with us, of course, but this year, with our armed forces engaged on two major fronts, Congress has pushed the pork in the defense budget to an all-time high, totaling $8.9 billion. And even as they did so -- and voted to fund wartime operations at only a fraction of what nearly all analysts agree is needed for the duration of 2005 -- conservatives, liberals and moderates alike have presented themselves as doing everything they can think of to support the troops in the field. Don't believe it.

A brief examination of how the Senate, where I worked for three decades for senators from both parties, handled the defense appropriations bill this summer illustrates the chasm between appearances and reality. On June 24, the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, Alaska Republican Ted Stevens, rammed the $416 billion bill through the Senate in just a few hours. Forty-two amendments, the majority of them involving small spending projects promoted by senators with an eye on bringing home the bacon, were adopted by unrecorded "voice" votes -- usually after cursory deliberation that failed even to explain the subject matter.
....
As usual, McCain performed the very useful task of highlighting many of the amendments, tallying up the cost and offering appropriately caustic remarks about his colleagues' penchant for "porking up our appropriations bills." Based on such revelations, a few journalists wrote articles about some of the foolishness, such as how Stevens and his fellow Alaska Republican, Sen. Lisa Murkowski, had junked up the bill with help for their state's fisheries.

But both McCain and the press were just going through the motions. With Stevens in a big rush to push the defense bill through in just one day, McCain helped speed things along by not taking the time to actually deliver his speech. Instead, he simply had Stevens insert the text into the Congressional Record. Stevens was probably happy to extend McCain this courtesy. Not only did the unspoken speech not draw undue attention to the Senate's goings-on that day, but McCain was also helping out by taking no parliamentary action against the pork-laden bill. He didn't even throw up a speed bump by seeking recorded roll call votes, let alone any real debate, on the pork amendments. Roll call votes take at least 15 minutes each, and spending that much time on a few dozen amendments was apparently more inconvenience than McCain was willing to impose.
....
In parts of the bill that no one talked about, the Armed Services Committee raided the accounts that support combat readiness. Specifically, the committee cut Army depot weapons maintenance by $100 million (just when the repair backlog from the wars has grown to unmanageable proportions), and it removed $1.5 billion from the services' "working capital funds" for transportation and consumables (e.g. helicopter rotor blades, tank tracks, spare parts, fuel, food and much more). In one unseemly move, the committee also cut from one account $532 million for civilian repair technicians activated to support the deployed forces, claiming the money should have been credited elsewhere in the bill. But then it failed to add the money where it said it belonged.

In another feat of legislative trickery, the committee cut another $1.67 billion throughout the bill in anticipation of lower inflation in 2005 -- a pretense at a savings that OMB said in written comments to the committee "do[es] not exist." OMB concluded that "the practical effect of these reductions would be cuts to critical readiness accounts." In response, the Armed Services Committee did nothing and urged the Senate to endorse its bill, which it did by a vote of 97-0 on June 23.
....
And the media? Not for the first time, they were sound asleep. Using members' ready-for-publication news releases (or anonymous tips from their staffs) and fact sheets from the Appropriations Committee can help a harried journalist meet an impending deadline on long and complex legislation. But only part of the story will be told. Four hundred pages of legalese and small print tables in a bill and committee report can actually make some pretty interesting reading, but apparently no journalist seems to think so. I have looked for but failed to find even a single news article about the raids by the Armed Services and Appropriations committees on funding intended to help the armed forces fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's all there in the fiendish details, but they were ignored.

The consequences are serious. Extraordinarily expensive defense bills pass Congress, and the congressional authors are credited with being pro-defense heavies. Pork-busting reformers augment their already inflated reputations. The troops in the field think Washington is doing its best to help them, and the public believes no stone is left unturned to ensure that the nation's sons and daughters are being sent to war with all the training and other forms of support we would want for them.

In each case, the reality is quite different. Nonetheless, Congress is content; there's $8.9 billion in pork to impress the voters back home before the elections, and no one is the wiser about what is really being done to "raise and support armies" and "provide and maintain a navy" -- or not.

I was unaware of all of this. Were you?

Lou's Crusade

Outsourcing and Patriotism

By Bill Moyers, NOW. Posted August 21, 2004.

Lou Dobbs talks about how American businesses are putting their interests ahead of the national interest with the outsourcing of jobs.

Following is Bill Moyers inteview with CNN's Lou Dobbs on the PBS program NOW. Moyers starts the interview by discussing Dobbs' new book, "Exporting America : Why Corporate Greed Is Shipping American Jobs Overseas."

Bill Moyers: This book is more than an economic argument, it's a political manifesto. Let me read you the opening paragraph. Quote, "The power of big business over our national life has never been greater. Never have there been fewer business leaders willing to commit to the national interest over the selfish interest for the good of the company over that of the company's they head." Are you saying that these companies are unpatriotic for outsourcing jobs?

Dobbs: The economist who is the father of the comparative and absolute advantage. He did not in any way suggest that you should have the middle class of any country competing with 30 million unemployed Chinese. He never dreamed about the portability of the factors of production, capital and labor, our knowledge base, our technological advantages, which are being exported and sent to these countries for no other reason than the fact that their labor is cheaper than ours. And the idea that we would put our labor force in competition with the labor force in the case of India that's basically double our size, most of whom speak English, and work for about a tenth of our wages, is a political judgment. It is not an economic judgment.

Reality Check

Two Power Brokers Collide in Iraq
By JOHN F. BURNS

If there has been one message written in all that the insurgents have done, whether Sunnis or Shiites, these Iraqis say, it is a rejection of the very idea that Iraq's future can be chosen under an American military umbrella - more broadly, of the idea that America and its notions should have any place in reshaping Iraq at all.

When they were done with their spinning, senior Western officials who briefed reporters on the developments in Najaf seemed to agree. Najaf, one said bluntly, represented as crucial a juncture as America has faced in Iraq: one from which Iraq could proceed, with the emasculation of Mr. Sadr's rebellion, to a new period in which Iraqi politicians, not gunmen, could begin to set the country's agenda; or, conversely, if the government became resigned to leaving Mr. Sadr's militia still rooted in the city, to a further slide into chaos.

"If the government takes a hit in Najaf, it would encourage the various armed groups to stand up and say, 'O.K., Najaf belongs to us,' 'Falluja belongs to us,' 'Ramadi belongs to us,' 'Samarra belongs to us,' " the official said. In that case, he said, what would be left would not be a country with an accepted constitution and elections, but a "Lebanon-ization," a fracturing into separate, warlord-ruled fiefs, with the gun supplanting the rule of law.

Retreating into the orotund language favored by diplomats, he suggested that this was hardly what America intended when it came here promising Iraqis something far better than Saddam Hussein. "With different militias controlling different cities, that obviously doesn't promise the political stability Iraq needs," he said.

John Burns has been one of the better reporters on the scene in country, but the first part of this article is simple stenography for CENTCOM. This leak from the conclusion of the article is correct, however, we are headed for the Lebanon-ization of Iraq and we are watching it happen in Fallujah and Najaf.

Tom Engelhardt in today's Asia Times has a brilliant deconstruction of the terrible press coverage of the Iraq war.

Last week, through a front-page reconsideration of its Iraq reporting written by media columnist Howard Kurtz ("The Post on WMDs: An inside story"), the Washington Post finally hung out a piece or two of its dirty laundry. This comes three months after the New York Times buried its Iraq mea culpa on page 10 (and then its ombudsman Daniel Okrent did a far more forthcoming consideration of the same).

You'll also find the following howler from executive editor Leonard Downie Jr: "We were so focused on trying to figure out what the administration [of President George W Bush] was doing that we were not giving the same play to people who said it wouldn't be a good idea to go to war and were questioning the administration's rationale," not to speak of Bob Woodward's claim that "We had no alternative sources of information" - at a moment when he knew from the horse's mouth, so to speak, that the Bush administration was intent on war with Iraq. (Of course, you didn't need insider sources to grasp this, just a pair of eyes and ears.) Imagine, though, that Washington's imperial paper of record was focused only on discovering what then couldn't have been more obvious to tens of millions of people around the world: that the Bush administration was hell-bent on and determined only to go to war, WMD (weapons of mass destruction) or no. So imagine, in turn, Kurtz is the best we can hope for a year and a quarter after Baghdad was taken, after a series of tsunami-like events that have sent the Bush administration reeling, long after every aspect of its WMD claims has gone down those "aluminum tubes" (doubts about which the Post admits to having back-paged) and into oblivion. And they say the president has a tough time acknowledging error!

Dirty Tricks

via The Agonist:

Kerry files FEC complaint against swift boat group
Accuses 527 of illegally working with Bush campaign

Friday, August 20, 2004 Posted: 9:14 PM EDT (0114 GMT)

(CNN) -- The Kerry presidential campaign filed a complaint Friday with the Federal Election Commission, alleging that ads from an anti-Kerry veterans' group are inaccurate and "illegally coordinated" with Republicans and the Bush-Cheney campaign.

The Kerry campaign has denied any collusion with those groups.

But if you want to find out what the substance of the complaint is, you have to go to the blogosphere and the redoubtable Digby:

I wonder if its appropriate for Ken Cordier, a member of the steering committee for Veterans For Bush-Cheney '04 to appear in the new nonaffiliated independent 527 Swift Boat Liars For Bush ad?

But some might think it doesn't look quite kosher. In fact, some might think it looks downright illegal.

Thumbs Down

Growing Perception World Public Disapproves of War

College Park, MD: A new PIPA/Knoswledge Networks poll finds that a large majority perceives the Bush administration making assertions about pre-war Iraq in sharp contrast to the conclusions of the 9/11 Commission and the Senate Intelligence Committee. Eighty percent perceive the administration as "currently saying that Iraq, just before the war, had actual weapons of mass destruction" (60%) or that it had a major WMD program (20%). Similarly, 70% perceive the administration as currently saying Iraq "gave substantial support to al-Qaeda" (43%) or was directly involved in the September 11 attacks (27%).

(more here

What a relief! Here I was worrying that most of my fellow citizens were utter idiots.

For Thee and Me

3,000 Jobs; 500,000 Seekers
A tsunami of applicants at the ports here doesn't bode well for Bush.

Bush administration spin doctors won't be able to paint a happy face on the fact that an effort to fill 3,000 new jobs at the increasingly busy ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach led to a spectacular flood of applications, with half a million underemployed people seeking to fill the slots. This California gold rush — applications were mailed from across the country — is hard evidence of an unusually tough job market that continues to disappoint nearly three years into an economic recovery.

The port jobs, being filled after a lottery in which applicants' postcards were chosen from a giant bin, are part time and offer no benefits. Some could evaporate after crews process the wave of imported goods heading for store shelves in time for the holiday shopping season. Yet, as a labor union official put it, Thursday's job lottery clicked with Americans because "people are hungry for a decent job."

On that score, these jobs deliver. Pay ranges from $20.66 to $28 an hour, well above the average of $8.38 per hour that entry-level workers earn in Los Angeles County. And those whose names were drawn also fall in line for possible full-time employment and membership in the powerful International Longshore and Warehouse Union, with a pension and healthcare coverage. Contrast that promise with the frustrating reality facing many Americans who are struggling to make ends meet. California employers cut 17,300 jobs in July; nationwide, just 32,000 jobs were created, well below the 250,000 most economists had predicted. And many of the jobs being created look a lot worse than the jobs that have been eliminated.

Temporary workers remain in hot demand because employers question the economy's strength. Rising healthcare costs make hiring new workers prohibitively expensive for many businesses, while a growing outsourcing trend means some American companies are doing their hiring overseas. Even though corporate earnings have remained relatively strong throughout the recovery, the fruits of the economic rebound have been slow to trickle down to employees in the form of fatter paychecks. Employers don't need to dangle additional money to keep employees because so many Americans are looking for jobs.

Give President Bush credit for staying on message. The White House takes every opportunity to remind voters that this economic rebound comes courtesy of the administration's ill-advised and poorly timed tax cuts. No matter that the Congressional Budget Office recently confirmed that the tax cuts were skewed to benefit the richest Americans rather than middle-class taxpayers. The president is still calling on Congress to extend the cuts. So it's little surprise that a recent survey conducted by a financial services firm found upscale Americans more optimistic than at any time in the last two years.

The president undoubtedly will use the upcoming Republican convention to remind voters that the economy has "turned the corner." But photographs of port officials wading through half a million job applications are a stark reminder that, for many Americans, it's the wrong corner.

I believe I coined the phrase "bi-polar economy" earlier this year. That is what we have: one economy for the wealthy, another for the serf class, you and me. A decent job is something you get by lottery now, not by training, education and preparation.

BAH-AH-AH-AH

via the indispensible yankee doodle:

An antiseptic war
As American deaths near the 1000 mark, the horror is covered up with obfuscation, intimidation, and lies

We don’t see the flag-draped coffins of American soldiers arriving at Dover Air Force Base, thanks to the Pentagon’s rigid enforcement of a policy banning news photographers. And the media, either out of squeamishness or a desire not to be accused of being unpatriotic, have all but ignored those who have been seriously injured. In Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 there is a segment on soldiers who have lost limbs and who are undergoing slow, painful rehabilitation. What’s almost shocking is the realization of how little of this we’ve seen in the mainstream media. Young men and women are giving their lives and their limbs in a war that was launched under false pretenses, to ferret out weapons and terrorists that didn’t exist. And now those who actually paid the price for Bush’s war are being forgotten. The media must be held accountable for not showing the war’s true face, regardless of the obstacles. Their failure stands as yet another example of caving in to Bush and company.

The cover-up deepens. The American-installed puppet regime, led by the thuggish prime minister, Ayad Allawi, has recently taken to threatening journalists with death. Eager to crush the uprising led by the radical cleric Moqtada al-Sadr by any means necessary, the government has announced that it will shoot any foreign reporter who attempts to cover the fighting in the holy city of Najaf. Reuters quoted a police lieutenant as telling journalists, "We will kill you if you leave the hotel. I will put four snipers on the roof to shoot anyone who leaves."

New York Times reporter John Burns, interviewed earlier this week on PBS’s The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, said, "It’s come to the point where it’s really too dangerous for journalists to even enter Najaf." Noting that the Iraqi government also shut down Al-Jazeera recently, Burns added, "It begins to look as though Dr. Allawi’s government, for all its profession that it wants to protect journalists, is not very keen on giving us too close a coverage to what’s going on down there."

On that, you can be sure that the Allawi regime and the White House see eye to eye.

JUST AS the Bush administration’s surrogates are crushing dissent in Iraq, so is it attempting to intimidate those who would speak out against its policies at home. This week comes the remarkable news that the FBI has been questioning dissidents across the United States in hopes of keeping them away from the Republican National Convention in New York later this month.

According to a report in the New York Times, the FBI claims its efforts are aimed at preventing crime, not stopping protest marches. Yet its heavy-handed tactics could very well persuade many activists to stay home. Sarah Bardwell, a 21-year-old intern for a Denver anti-war organization affiliated with the pacifist American Friends Service Committee, said she had been visited by six investigators.

In an even more chilling example of the FBI’s anti–First Amendment tactics, three young men from Missouri reportedly decided against traveling to both the Democratic and Republican conventions after they received subpoenas and were told they were targets of an ill-defined terrorism investigation — apparently because they had engaged in minor civil disobedience at protests. In fact, they couldn’t have come to Boston even if they had wanted to, since they were ordered to testify before a grand jury during the Democratic convention. Their ACLU lawyer, Denise Lieberman, was quoted as saying that the three "got the message loud and clear that if you make plans to go to a protest, you could be subject to arrest or a visit from the FBI."

Flag-draped coffins arrive in the United States under cover of a government-imposed media blackout. An American-installed regime threatens to kill journalists. The FBI terrorizes dissidents into not exercising their free-speech rights. If such things had taken place while Richard Nixon was president, they would have been added to the bill of impeachment against him. How have we come to this?

The media having become the shepherds, we are a nation of sheep.

What Buttonwood Said

Oil Prices Hit Record on Fears of Iraqi Insurgency
By JAD MOUAWAD

Published: August 20, 2004

ARIS, Aug. 20 — Oil prices reached a new high today, before retreating to close below Thursday's record level, after the Iraqi insurgency increased its pressure on the country's oil infrastructure and traders feared growing unrest might interrupt crude exports.

Crude futures for September delivery traded in New York rose at one point to $49.40 a barrel, up 70 cents, the highest level since the New York Mercantile Exchange opened in 1983. But by the end of trading this afternoon, the price had dropped to $47.60 a barrel, down $1.10 from Thursday's record close of $48.70.

Oil has gained 57 percent so far this year, reaching records every day but one since July 30.

In Basra on Thursday night, insurgents set fire to the headquarters of Southern Oil, the company that operates Iraq's oilfields in the south. Oil exports have been cut in half, to one million barrels a day, since Aug. 8, after insurgents forced the closure of one of two pipelines in the area.

The other main outlet for Iraq's oil production, a pipeline linking the country's northern oilfields to Turkey, has been repeatedly hit in the past year, forcing its partial shutdown.

Before the war, Iraq's oil production hovered around 2.2 million barrels a day.

The attacks on Iraq's oil infrastructure come against the backdrop of fighting between the American military and Shiite militants in the city of Najaf and in the Baghdad suburb of Sadr City. There are conflicting reports today from news agencies about whether the Iraqi police had taken control in Najaf.

"The situation in Iraq has deteriorated. It's now like Murphy's Law: Everything that can go wrong, will," said Deborah White, an economist with SG Commodities in Paris. "Iraq is a war zone again."

Oil markets have been on edge in recent weeks, their concerns heightened by potential trouble in many of the world's largest oil regions. In Russia, it was pressure from the government against Yukos, the country's largest oil company. In Venezuela, it was a contested referendum on whether to oust President Hugo Chávez, though he did stay in office. In the Gulf of Mexico, Hurricane Charley forced the closure of oil installations. And in Iraq, the situation with Moktada al-Sadr, the cleric opposed to the interim Iraqi government and its American backers, is still unclear.

Since most countries are producing at their maximum levels, an interruption in exports from Iraq or elsewhere would not be easily matched. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, which accounts for about a third of the world's oil production, has little spare capacity itself to make up for production shortfalls.

OPEC's 11 members are pumping 30 million barrels a day, the highest level since 1979. They can lift production to 30.5 million barrels next month, according to OPEC, which is based in Vienna.

Only Saudi Arabia, OPEC's most powerful member, can still increase its output. The world's biggest oil producer has already raised production by one million barrels a day in recent months and is currently pumping 9.3 million barrels a day. Saudi Arabia still has another 1.3 million barrels a day it could bring to the market if needed.

"Because the oil markets are fundamentally tighter, the threat of a disruption is a real one," said Irene Himona, an analyst with Morgan Stanley in London. "This is where the fears concerning Russia, Venezuela and Iraq are playing in" and are driving up prices.

At the same time, Chinese consumption has fueled global demand growth over the past year. Both the International Energy Agency, based in Paris, and OPEC have been caught short by the strength of global oil demand. Both raised their forecasts in recent days.

The I.E.A., an adviser to 26 industrialized nations, projects global oil demand at 82.2 million barrels a day this year and 84 million barrels a day in 2005, about 730,000 barrels more than previously forecast.

For its part, OPEC now expects global oil consumption this year to reach 81.18 million barrels a day, up 280,000 barrels from an earlier estimate.

Tol' ya. Hello, Buttonwood. See post below.

Oil and Economics

Buttonwood
Pouring oil on the flames
Aug 20th 2004
From The Economist Global Agenda

How would financial markets react if the oil price stays stubbornly high?

Alas for oil consumers, the Middle East does not have a monopoly on instability: from Russia to Venezuela, fate has decided to hide oil under some pretty unsavoury countries. The oil price has climbed further of late as the troubles of these two countries in particular have bubbled to the surface.

If consumers do not pick up the full tab, companies will have to pick up some of it through lower margins. There is plenty of room for them to do so because profits are at record highs. Falling profits are unlikely to be anything but baleful for a stockmarket that is generously valued and under pressure from rising interest rates. Any industry heavily exposed to a high oil price and falling consumption would not seem the most toothsome of investments. Possibly, then, car companies and (especially) airlines might best be taken off the menu. Shares in both have already lost around 20% of their value this year, compared with a fall of some 4% in the S&P; 500.

For Your Retirement

Bush Opening Social Security Debate Without Saying Much

By Peter Wallsten, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Even as President Bush has started telling voters that overhauling Social Security would be a key part of his second-term agenda, he is likely to avoid offering specifics before election day, according to Bush aides, lawmakers and privatization advocates.

Instead of getting into details, which would almost certainly embroil him in controversy, Bush is campaigning on broad principles for revamping the 70-year-old retirement system in a way that fits his vision for an "ownership society," the sources said.

Bush revised his campaign speech in recent weeks to include a push for changing the program to permit personal investment accounts, a proposal many conservative activists have been hoping for months he would spotlight.

"I'm worried about our Social Security system," he said Wednesday at a stop in Wisconsin. "I'm not worried about it for baby boomers like me. The system is solvent. But if you're a younger worker, I think it's important that you be allowed to have your own personal savings account that you can carry with you throughout your life…. "

Bush is promising to protect existing benefits for current retirees and others who will soon retire, while holding the line on the paycheck deductions that finance Social Security. But he is reiterating his desire to let younger workers begin using for private investment some of the money they pay to the government for the program.

Purposefully left unanswered are the most divisive questions — such as what fraction of a worker's payroll taxes could go into a private investment account instead of the Social Security trust fund, how the government would pay the estimated $1 trillion in transition costs, and how the government would protect retirees whose investments did not turn out well.

Many experts, including some conservatives, also think any meaningful privatization plan would eventually involve some combination of reduced benefits and higher worker contributions. Bush is expected to continue to skirt that issue as well.

Confronting such matters, Republican strategists fear, could make Bush and other GOP candidates vulnerable to attacks in key states such as Florida, where senior voters have a history of punishing candidates who talk of changing Social Security.
....
"Social Security faces a long-term deficit, but calling it a crisis is an exaggeration," said Peter Orszag, an economist at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan think tank. "The scale of the problem is manageable. If your car has a flat tire, you don't get rid of the car."

Polls show a majority of voters back the creation of personal accounts, particularly when the question is posed without mention of potentially higher taxes or shrinking benefits.

A Gallup Poll last fall showed that more than six in 10 voters backed a shift to private accounts. But it also showed a stark generational divide — 82% of voters younger than 30 backed the privatization proposal, but support steadily declined among other age groups, to less than 30% among those at least 65.

"People who are into the system now have no interest in changing anything because they're worried about losing benefits," said Frank Newport, the poll's editor in chief.

As Comrade Max has taught us so many times, the "Social Security Scare" is just that, another GOP terror tactic. Social Security is fine with nothing more than a little tweaking. Further down the article, the LAT writers try to make the case that the solvency of SS is a partisan issue, which is silly, it's an accounting issue. Balancing numbers isn't a partisan process.

CYA in Boldface Italic

Every time I think Bushco has defined the outer limits of outrage, they push it a little further.

CIA Study on Iraq Weapons Is Off Course, Officials Say
The agency is trying to project what Hussein may have developed had the U.S. not invaded.

By Greg Miller, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Having failed to find banned weapons in Iraq, the CIA is preparing a final report on its search that will speculate on what the deposed regime's capabilities might have looked like years from now if left unchecked, according to congressional and intelligence officials.

The CIA plans for the report, due next month, to project as far as 2008 what Iraq might have achieved in its illegal weapons programs if the United States had not invaded the country last year, the officials said.

The new direction of the inquiry is seen by some officials as an attempt to obscure the fact that no banned weapons — or even evidence of active programs — have been found, and instead emphasize theories that Iraq may have been planning to revive its programs.

The change in focus has angered some intelligence officials and at least one key Democrat in Congress and has brought charges of political motivation.

Rep. Jane Harman (D-Venice) protested the decision in a sharply worded letter to acting CIA Director John E. McLaughlin last week. Trying to forecast Iraq's weapons capabilities four years into the future would be, "by definition, highly speculative" and "inconsistent with the original mission of the Iraq Survey Group," Harman wrote, according to a copy of the letter obtained by The Times.

Such an effort would be a significant departure for a survey group whose primary mission when it was established last year was to locate and destroy stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons that the CIA and other agencies believed were hidden across Iraq.

David Kay, who led the group before resigning in January, said that speculating on Iraq's future capabilities was never part of the team's mission.

"Absolutely not," Kay said in a telephone interview Thursday. "We were to search for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. No one ever suggested to me in any of the discussions before I took the job, afterward, or even when I left, that [assessing Iraq's future capabilities] was a thing that should have been done."

Kay and others also questioned how such an assessment would be possible given the disarray that characterized President Saddam Hussein's government in recent years and external events that had altered the flow of illicit weapons technologies around the world.

Kay reported in January that Iraq's programs were dormant before the war. The country was still subject to United Nations sanctions and was facing a new round of inspections. Since then, authorities have cracked down on global weapons markets, most notably by unraveling the proliferation of nuclear weapons technology by Pakistani scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan.

Kay was replaced in January by former U.N. weapons inspector Charles Duelfer, who is overseeing the production of the survey group's final report. A CIA spokesman declined to say whether the report would attempt to forecast what Iraq's weapons programs might have looked like if there had not been a U.S. invasion.

"Charles Duelfer's mission is to search for the truth, and he made clear when he took the job that he was absolutely committed to following the evidence wherever it takes us," CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield said. "That is what he's doing, and that is what will be reflected in his report."

The failure to find stockpiles of banned weapons has been a source of embarrassment to the CIA, as well as to the Bush administration, which made ridding Hussein of illicit arms the main rationale for a preemptive war against Iraq.

For that reason, some officials familiar with the CIA's plans for the final report said they thought it was politically motivated and designed to focus the public's attention on hypothetical future threats.

"The case made by the Bush White House was that [Iraq] was an imminent threat that must be dealt with today," said a senior congressional official who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Coming out later and saying [Hussein] would have had the weapons in 2006 or 2008 … is basically a way to justify preemption."

In other words, he might have had weapons of mass destruction related programs at some point in the future. Boys, I think this ship has already sailed.

Oil Threat

Oil Rises Above $49 a Barrel as Iraq Fighting Threatens Exports

Aug. 20 (Bloomberg) -- Crude oil futures rose to a record, surpassing $49 a barrel in New York, on concern that fighting between U.S. forces and followers of Shiite Muslim cleric Moqtada al-Sadr will cut shipments.

Crude oil for September delivery was up 58 cents, or 1.2 percent, at $49.28 a barrel at 10:01 a.m. on the New York Mercantile Exchange. Prices reached $49.33 a barrel, the highest since oil began trading in New York in 1983. Futures were 59 percent higher than a year earlier.

As Oil Prices Boil . . .

By David Ignatius
Friday, August 20, 2004; Page A19

You wouldn't know it from the running-on-empty rhetoric of the U.S. presidential campaign, but crude oil prices hit an all-time high this week of more than $48 a barrel. Some economists are warning about a full-blown energy crisis, with prices rising to $65 or more until they bring on a global recession that finally slows demand.

The oil market right now is a sort of inverse bubble, propelled by its own momentum of anxiety and bad news. Wherever analysts look for reliable sources of oil, they see trouble -- in Iraq, in Saudi Arabia, in Russia, in Venezuela. And on the demand side, they see the inexorable rise of the Chinese economy and its new hunger for oil imports. So traders bid up the price of crude.

It's a one-way market at the moment, with prices crashing through the previous barriers. "The $50 level is acting like a magnet," energy consultant Peter Beutel told the Associated Press on Wednesday, after prices for U.S. light crude topped $47 per barrel.

No market goes up forever. But Philip Verleger, a respected energy economist, warns that over the next several years, the price pressure will probably get worse. "Prices may rise to $50 per barrel, or $60 per barrel, or even $70 per barrel," he writes in a recent report to clients. "They will likely remain there until growth in petroleum demand slows down enough to match available refining, logistical and productive capacity."

Verleger says the situation reminds him of 1973, when James Akins, who later became U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs titled "The Oil Crisis: This Time the Wolf Is Here." Soon after the article appeared, oil prices spiked -- to double even what Akins had predicted. "I have that ghastly feeling that we are about to repeat that cycle," Verleger worries.
....
So with a severe energy crisis just over the horizon, what do the U.S. presidential candidates have to say? Not much that's helpful. The Kerry and Bush campaigns both have energy policies, of course. In fact, they're actually quite similar -- calling for more investment in coal and other alternatives to oil. But there's no sense, in either camp, that the country is facing a severe threat to its economy.

Both candidates attack each other for once favoring new taxes on energy. The Bush Web site even has a gizmo that allows you to calculate, with spurious precision, how much the gasoline tax increase that Kerry advocated years ago would cost you -- depending on the make and model of your car, where you live, and how many miles you drive each week. The Kerry Web site, not to be outdone in the cheap-shot department, denounces a proposal Vice President Cheney made in 1986 to tax oil imports -- claiming that if enacted, it would by now have cost consumers $1.2 trillion.

What makes these taxophobic attacks especially outrageous is that many economists believe new taxes on oil are one of the few ways that the United States might regain control of its energy destiny -- and move from the crazy oil-anxiety bubble of today toward something more stable and secure.

The non-debate over energy illustrates what's depressing about this campaign. The country is in serious trouble -- with record-high oil prices and the threat of a new energy crisis just one example of our global problems. But rather than the serious debate the country needs, we're hearing platitudes. George Bush and John Kerry evidently would rather play it safe and avoid politically controversial proposals, which in today's world is downright dangerous.

The Dark Side

Doctors implicated in abuse of Iraqi prisoners

00:01 20 August 04

NewScientist.com news service

The medical community is calling for an investigation into the role of US medical staff in the prisoner abuse that took place in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, according to two new journal articles and appeals from physicians' groups.

Miles, along with the journal's editors, is calling for a full investigation of the role of medical staff after he scoured news reports and available government documents on the abuse.

Abu Ghraib Probe Points to Top Brass

By Josh White and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, August 20, 2004; Page A01

An Army investigation into the role of military intelligence personnel in the abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison reports that the scandal was not just caused by a small circle of rogue military police soldiers but resulted from failures of leadership rising to the highest levels of the U.S. command in Iraq, senior defense officials said.

The officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity because the report has not yet been completed, said the 9,000-page document says that a combination of leadership failings, confounding policies, lack of discipline and absolute confusion at the prison led to the abuse. It widens the scope of culpability from seven MPs who have been charged with abuse to include nearly 20 low-ranking soldiers who could face criminal prosecution in military courts. No Army officers, however, are expected to face criminal charges.

Officials also said that the report implicates five civilian contractors in the abuse, and that Army officials plan to recommend that their cases be sent to the Justice Department for possible prosecution in civilian courts.

The investigation, shepherded by Maj. Gen. George R. Fay, is one of several into the abuse, which became widely known after hundreds of photographs surfaced depicting detainees in mock sexual positions, in a naked human pyramid and being intimidated by unmuzzled dogs. While the Pentagon and the White House have consistently blamed the abuse on what they have called a rogue band of MPs acting on their own, officials said this new report spreads the blame and points to widespread problems at the prison.

The findings, elements of which were reported by other news organizations, appear to support contentions by defense attorneys for the charged MPs that the problems at the prison were pervasive and were exacerbated by a lack of leadership. The lawyers have asserted that their clients were acting on orders when they stripped detainees and kept them awake using stress positions and humiliating poses. Officials said the Fay report will stop short of saying that soldiers were ordered to abuse detainees.

One senior defense official said the investigation specifically decries the fact that many soldiers saw or knew of the abuse and never reported it to authorities. Concerns are also raised about the vague instructions from high-ranking officials about what was allowed during interrogations at the prison, which led military intelligence and military police soldiers to misapply them, the official said.

"The interrogation policy was misunderstood, and it was one of a few policies that failed," the official said. "There was total confusion about the military intelligence tactics, techniques and procedures."

Another defense official said the Army study would be "a comprehensive report, a thorough look at another aspect of Abu Ghraib, to include up to the CJTF-command level," a reference to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who until recently was the top U.S. commander in Iraq. Others said the report criticizes the leadership but softens its assessment by noting that top officers were focused on the insurgency that erupted last summer.

Officials said the probe criticizes commanders for essentially failing to pick up the strong signs of abuse as they rose through the chain of command and for all but ignoring reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross detailing the abuse.

The top command "shares responsibility for not ensuring proper leadership, proper discipline and proper resources," one defense official said. "Command should have paid more attention to the issue. Signals, symptoms of abuse weren't fully vetted to the top."

Military officials said Fay's report is expected to be presented to the public early next week. An independent investigative panel appointed by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld plans to issue its report on Tuesday. The Senate Armed Services Committee announced yesterday separate hearings set for Sept. 9 to deal with both reports.

In the medical journal the Lancet, an American physician and bioethicist called for an investigation of the role medical personnel may have played in enabling and overlooking the abuse at Abu Ghraib.

"The U.S. military medical system failed to protect detainees' human rights, sometimes collaborated with interrogators or abusive guards, and failed to properly report injuries or deaths caused by beatings," Steven H. Miles of the Center for Bioethics at the University of Minnesota wrote in the issue published today.

The Lancet requires fairly intrusive registration for limited access for non-subscribers. Here is an excerpt from Miles article:

Confirmed or reliably reported abuses of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan include beatings, burns, shocks, bodily suspensions, asphyxia, threats against detainees and their relatives, sexual humiliation, isolation, prolonged hooding and shackling, and exposure to heat, cold, and loud noise.1,14,19,24,33,34 These include deprivation of sleep, food, clothing, and material for personal hygiene, and denigration of Islam and forced violation of its rites.19 Detainees were forced to work in areas that were not de-mined and seriously injured.34 Abuses of women detainees are less well documented but include credible allegations of sexual humiliation and rape.13,14,35

US Army investigators concluded that Abu Ghraib's medical system for detainees was inadequately staffed and equipped.8,11,13,16,17 The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) found that the medical system failed to maintain internment cards with medical information necessary to protect the detainees' health as required by the Geneva Convention; this reportedly was due to a policy of not officially processing (ie, recording their presence in the prison) new detainees.16,34 Few units in Iraq and Afghanistan complied with the Geneva obligation to provide monthly health inspections.17 The medical system also failed to assure that prisoners could request proper medical care as required by the Geneva Convention. For example, an Abu Ghraib detainee's sworn document says that a purulent hand injury caused by torture went untreated. The individual was also told by an Iraqi physician working for the US that bleeding of his ear (from a separate beating) could not be treated in a clinic; he was treated instead in a prison hallway.20

The medical system failed to establish procedures, as called for by Article 30 of the Geneva Convention, to ensure proper treatment of prisoners with disabilities. An Abu Ghraib prisoner's deposition reports the crutch that he used because of a broken leg was taken from him and his leg was beaten as he was ordered to renounce Islam. The same detainee told a guard that the prison doctor had told him to immobilise a badly injured shoulder; the guard's response was to suspend him from the shoulder.21....

Legal arguments as to whether detainees were prisoners of war, soldiers, enemy combatants, terrorists, citizens of a failed state, insurgents, or criminals miss an essential point. The US has signed or enacted numerous instruments including the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights,45 the UN Body of Principles for the Protection of All Persons under Any Form of Detention or Imprisonment,46 UN Standard Minimum Rules for the Treatment of Prisoners,36 the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment,47 and US military internment and inter-rogation policies,8-10 collectively containing mandatory and voluntary standards barring US armed forces from practicing torture or degrading treatments of all persons.

For example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights states: "No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment."45 The Geneva Convention states: "Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction . . . The following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: Violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; . . . Outrages upon personal dignity, in particular, humiliating and degrading treatment . . . No physical or mental torture, nor any other form of coercion, may be inflicted on prisoners of war to secure from them information of any kind whatever. Prisoners of war who refuse to answer may not be threatened, insulted, or exposed to any unpleasant or disadvantageous treatment of any kind."48 Furthermore, the US War Crimes Act says that US forces will comply with the Annex to the Hague Convention Respecting the Laws and Customs of War on Land and the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War both of which bar torture or inhumane treatment.48-50

Pentagon leaders testified that military officials did not investigate or act on reports by Amnesty International and the ICRC of abuses at Abu Ghraib and other coalition detention facilities throughout 2002 and 2003.1,24,33,34 The command at Abu Ghraib and in Iraq was inattentive to human rights organisations' and soldiers' oral and written reports of abuses.51 After the ICRC criticised the treatment of Abu Ghraib detainees, its access to detainees was curtailed.1

The role of military medicine in these abuses merits special attention because of the moral obligations of medical professionals with regard to torture and because of horror at health professionals who are silently or actively complicit with torture. Active medical complicity with torture has occurred throughout the world. Physicians collaborated with torture during Saddam Hussein's regime.52 Physicians' and nurses' professional organisations have created codes against participation in torture.25-26,31,53,54 Physicians in Chile, Egypt, Turkey and other nations have taken great personal risks to expose state-sponsored torture.25,26,55 Health professionals have created organisations including Physicians for Human Rights and Amnesty International's Health Professionals Network. Numerous non-medical groups have asserted that healers must be advocates for persons at risk of torture.25,26,31,32,56

This is what was done in our name. If we are not outraged, we are the moral equivalent of the monsters which inflicted this abuse.