US Army Misses Feb Recruiting Goal by Almost 30%

USA Today reports that the Army recruited 5,114 soldiers in February, 1,936 fewer than its goal. This dramatic shortfall in new soldiers happened even though the Army has more recruiters than ever and is offering record cash bonuses to new recruits -- up to $20,000 if you commit to four years. The Marine Corp missed its target in January for the first time in a decade. Also, everyone has soaked up all the "delayed entry" people who usually ensure a steady stream of new soldiers.

This problem began in the National Guard and Reserve and is now spreading to active recruits. It's going to get worse and worse and worse over the coming year. (It's hard to imagine ANYONE who would sign up right now for anything other than the Air Force and Navy -- which are far away from danger in Iraq.)

USA Today quotes one analyst who says recruiting will probably "fall off a cliff" this year.

Bush's shameful abuse of the original intent of the Reserves and National Guard, his backdoor draft that forces people who have fulfilled their duty to this country and sometimes even retired to go back to the front lines, his disrespect for soldiers as reflected in the miserable health care they are receiving, his disregard for their safety (has the MSM done any updates on proper armor for cars, tanks etc in Iraq? Nope) and general disdain for our men and women in uniform is going to have a DISASTROUS effect on our nation's ability to protect itself and project power around the world for years if not decades to come. Read the rest of this post...

Bush: The King of Coalition Building

George Bush proves once again how nimble he is at coalition building. His representatives went to a UN forum on equality and -- despite being way OT -- tried to demand an idiotic insertion to the main document that made clear nothing should be construed as a "right to abortion." Whatever your stance on abortion, this forum had nothing to do with it whatsoever and the main document the UN Forum was going to release was a nonbinding declaration and not a treaty and no one in their right mind could have imagined it was creating new human rights or a right to an abortion. According to the New York Times, even one of the US's own delegates called Bush's action a "mischievous distraction."

Everyone scoffed at the demand and Bush's ambassador Ellen R. Sauerbrey was able to get all of two countries to back the amendment: Egypt and Qatar. Boy, nothing says respect for human rights like those two. Most other nations, including all 25 in the European Union, said it was absurd.

In classic Bush fashion, Ambassador Sauerbrey declared this a victory and withdrew the demand. Read the rest of this post...

Bush to CIA: I hate you, now come here and give me a kiss

I'm sure that will go over as well as your new overture to Europe. You're an idiot, they know it, and they also know you hate them. What part of the past four years do you think either the CIA or Europe is going to forget? Read the rest of this post...

Open thread

Have at it Read the rest of this post...

The coming crackdown on blogs

A number of the other blogs have been linking to this article, and it deserves a link here as well. There are a lot of unresolved issues regarding the Internet and how it applies to federal election law. Nonetheless, the big hand of government needs to be very careful in this realm so they don't squelch what has become a rather vibrant and amazingly healthy new area of public debate and discourse.

You can find News.com's article on this here.

And below I'm posting a copy of an article I wrote for the Economist on this very topic. It's kind of amazing that it sounds from the News.com article that the issues haven't changed very much. That's part of what scares me. The FEC still doesn't understand what the Internet really is - it needs to walk very carefully in this realm.

The Economist
December 11, 1999
Political campaigns online: Beyond the law's reach?
by John Aravosis

washington, dc

THE Internet has come of age in this presidential campaign. Every candidate has his sophisticated website, and sets great store by it. But what about the hangers-on, who set up websites either to support a candidate or, more often, to ridicule him?

George W. Bush knows what should happen to the latter: they should be squashed. He has been suffering from the attentions of www.gwbush.com, a spoof site with an official-looking photograph of Mr Bush that proves, on closer inspection, to feature a straw stuck up the governor's nose. Mr Bush has sent a cease-and-desist letter to the site's creator, Zack Exley, accusing him of using pictures "borrowed" from his website. He has also complained to the Federal Election Commission (FEC) that the site constitutes "express advocacy", and violates the Federal Election Campaign Act's spending limits and registration requirements.

The FEC - the "Failure to Enforce Commission", its critics call it - is unsure what to do about this. It is seeking public comment over the next two months on how election law should apply to sites like Mr Exley's, and indeed how it applies to the Internet in general. It is a large problem. One voter in every ten surfs the net to find advice on how to vote. Lobbyists bombard Congress with electronic messages: the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent over 200,000 last year. Politicians raise big sums online (Bill Bradley has just passed $1m). And from RunHillary.com to AlBore.com, websites laud and lampoon nearly every candidate.

The FEC says it is "unquestionable" that federal election law applies to activity on the Internet. Critics such as the ACLU disagree. "Political speech deserves the highest protection of the first amendment and should only be regulated if there's a threat of corruption," says Laura Murphy, director of the organisation's office in Washington, DC. "The FEC has yet to demonstrate how this new web technology could have a corrupting influence on the political process." Yet an exceptionally large e-mail Christmas card list, or a highly-visited website, may be so influential - and even so corrupting - that it could draw the FEC's attention.

Others say money should be the criterion for FEC involvement. If people are not spending much money on their advocacy, they should stay unregulated. Yet on the Internet, partisans can build websites and send thousands of e-mails at a tiny cost.

David Mason, one of the FEC's six commissioners, said recently that the FEC would take a relatively permissive approach to Internet activity, exempting most private political speech. "It is my view", he said, "that someone who is operating on their own would be covered by an exemption in the act which applies to voluntary activity." On the other hand (considerable confusion here), "the volunteer exemption applies to someone who is volunteering on behalf of the campaign, and if you're out there on your own you may not be covered."

It appears, then, that the exemption may not cover volunteers who are truly independent of the candidates they support. Take the case of Noah Heller, a 19-year-old freshman student and co-owner of NetizensForBradley.org. Mr Heller has deliberately had no contact with the Bradley campaign, to avoid being labelled an in-kind contribution. Yet, by obeying the letter of the law, he is truly "on his own", and possibly not covered by the volunteer exemption.

Then there is the question of websites that generate revenue. "When you start taking money from somebody for what you're doing, that is a different sort of thing than volunteer activity in your home," says Mr Mason. But many personal websites, having almost no money behind them, try to offset costs with banner ads and other e-commerce. Mr Exley, for example, sells T-shirts and bumper stickers on gwbush.com to help maintain the site. He has also been soliciting online donations to create television and e-commercials critical of Mr Bush (he raised $2,500 in only five days). But the ads may very likely draw the FEC's attention.

A case last year gave some guidance on how the FEC might treat websites that do not merit a volunteer exemption. Leo Smith, a tax consultant in Connecticut, built a personal website advocating the defeat of a local congresswoman, Nancy Johnson. The FEC said the site constituted "express advocacy" that would trigger an independent-expenditure reporting requirement if its value rose above $250. However, if Mr Smith co-ordinated his activities with Ms Johnson's official opponent, it would become an "in-kind" contribution that could not exceed $1,000.

But how would the FEC put a value on the site? The commission said it would add the fee for registering the domain name (typically $70) to the overhead costs of the computer hardware and software (these could easily be over $1,000) and Internet services (perhaps $240 a year), then divide that sum by the total number of websites Mr Smith maintained. Such a formula could push most websites over the legal threshold. But the more an individual used the Internet to influence politics, the more likely he would be to avoid regulation, as total expenses (which are fixed) would be divided by a greater number of sites.

The finances of websites are often mysterious even to their creators. At NetizensForBradley.org, Greg Laynor, one of the site's founders (who also happens to be 14, and at school), explains that dozens of volunteers work on the site, but that they have not spoken to each other. They communicate only by e-mail. Even Greg and Mr Heller, the other founder of the site, have never spoken. There is no way for them to know what money the collective has spent on maintaining the site, and therefore whether they have passed the spending limits. And it is possible that the FEC might count the hardware and software costs of the volunteers.

Hyperlinks (a word, phrase or image on a web page that, when clicked, sends you elsewhere) are also tricky. Mr Mason says hyperlinks on personal websites should be exempt, and those on commercial sites regulated. But, again, everything depends on value; and how should hyperlinks be valued, when they can be created in seconds at no marginal cost, and are often paid for by barter (you link to me, I link to you)? It is also hard to see how anyone could spend $250 - the limit for unreported independent expenditure - on forwarding e-mails. But Mr Mason says that e-mail lists of a certain size, even if they did not surpass spending limits, may require regulation.

When does an e-mail list, or a website, get too large or influential? Even a handful of e-mails can have a disproportionate impact. In 1996, the Children's Defence Fund's 2,000 e-mail subscribers regularly forwarded alerts to another 200,000 people. And a high-profile complaint can propel a previously obscure website to fame, attracting the eye of the regulators. (Visitors to gwbush.com soared from 30 to around 500,000 a month after Mr Bush filed his complaint.) How will the FEC know when such a nebulous line is crossed, and, more important, how will the Internet advocates know?

Roger Stone, a former election lawyer who is director of political advocacy for Juno Online Services, says the rules are now so confusing that "even lawyers call specialists." In the case of NetizensForBradley.org, the specialist is the young Greg Laynor, who has read all the FEC literature but still concludes that "it's not clear if we're doing something wrong." Mr Stone says the commission must tailor its rules to non-lawyers like Greg, lest frustrated netizens "ignore the law and act at their peril, or throw up their hands and decide it's not worth becoming politically involved."

The beginnings of a chill are already in the air. At the end of November Mr Mason complained that the FEC had received only 24 e-mails during the first two weeks of public comment. And at least one big political website said it would not submit comments for fear of attracting the regulators' attention.

Read the rest of this post...

I'm on Air America, like right now

Oops, forgot to tell folks. You can listen live online (click on the green 'listen live' button). Read the rest of this post...

Congressman Plagiarist weighs in

Atrios has the goods on that wonderful little GOP congressman who thinks liberals should be used as human shields in Iraq. Well, seems the guy plagiarized his entire speech. Wonder if he works for Talon News? Read the rest of this post...

Pro-lifers going a tad too far

From Alicublog. Read the rest of this post...

LOL WorldNetDaily runs article promoting anti-gay quack scientist who was debunked 20+ years ago

Ok, this is actually funny. WorldNetDaily - you remember them? The site that wrote the article harshly critical of Gannon and the White House?

Well, I suspect they got some pressure from the religious right to make amends. All I know is that today they came out with an article claiming that gays molest foster children. The thing they don't tell you is that the "scientist" who did the "study" has been SO debunked that EVEN THE RELIGIOUS RIGHT DOESN'T CITE HIS RESEARCH ANYMORE. I mean, the guy was debunked as a fraud 20 years ago!

I am actually shocked that WingNutDaily printed this. I'm really not kidding. Cameron has been so debunked - he was kicked out of the lead scientific association decades ago for his bigoted and faulty research, and even admonished by a judge! - that it's just downright weird that they'd cite him. And after WND's wonderful little article last week about how what their Web site cares about is "the truth," no matter who it hurts. Well, guys, you just made total asses of yourselves.

Thanks to fellow blogger Pam for spotting this.

A few facts:

Detailed Info about Paul Cameron
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_cameron_sheet.html
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_cameron.html

Facts About Homosexuality and Child Molestation
http://psychology.ucdavis.edu/rainbow/html/facts_molestation.html

APA Debunking Pedophilia Myth (also, other good stuff on this page) - revised
July 1998
http://www.apa.org/pubinfo/answers.html#goodparents Read the rest of this post...

God, I love wingnuts

This is choice. The far-right nuts are saying that David Brock's media watchdog group is associated with George Soros. Not that there's anything wrong with that, we love Soros. And we'd LOVE to be associated with George Soros, if any Soros funding people are reading. :-)

What's so damn funny, and sad, about what the right is now doing is that they're claiming David has links to Soros because, get this, his organization has gotten help from MoveOn and other groups that Soros has given grants to. Yeah. So? Now they're trying to claim that David lied when he said he hadn't received any money for groups affiliated with Soros. Well he hasn't. Groups affiliated with Soros would be his various grant-making organizations. But just cuz one group accepts grants from a Soros organization hardly makes them a "Soros affiliated organization."

And in the end, who cares. I hope George Soros ends up giving David a LOT of money. He deserves it. And hopefully he'll give the rest of us a lot as well. The right-wing can try to make George Soros the bad guy all they want. It's what they usually do. Take the biggest threat and demonize him (e.g., Michael Moore, John Kerry, Hillary and Bill, and now George Soros). The best thing to do in response is shrug it off and embrace the people they hate. After all, I can't think of a better resume builder than that right wingnut groups think you're a bad man. Read the rest of this post...

Even Ah-nuld Backs Off From Private Accounts For Pensions

I love some of Gov. Schwarzenegger's plans to shake up California, which has always led the way with innovative changes that -- if they work-- spread nationwide. His plan to take redistricting out of the hands of politicians and have it done by a panel of non-partisan retired judges could be the single most important reform he ever does.

But even Ah-nuld is starting to back away from insisting that the State's pension plan be converted into private accounts a la Bush's plan for Social Security. He's been steamrolling over the state politicians whenever he gets the chance, but Schwarzenegger is also very savvy about adapting to political realities -- definitely more good news that Bush's dangerous plan to dismantle Social Security is in deep trouble. Read the rest of this post...

Tell me this isn't the scary preacher guy from Poltergeist 2

He's baaaaack. Read the rest of this post...

CBSNews.com: Comparing bloggers to Hunter S. Thompson

Again, wow. I have to admit, I've never read his stuff. I really need to.

Several obits of the late Hunter S. Thompson described him as a precursor of today's bloggers. As The New York Times viewed it "his early work presaged some of the fundamental changes that have rocked journalism today. Mr. Thompson's approach in many ways mirrors the style of modern-day bloggers, those self-styled social commentators who blend news, opinion and personal experience on Internet postings. Like bloggers, Mr. Thompson built his case for the state of America around the framework of his personal views and opinions."

Having spent the better part of the past two weeks in the blogosphere working on a column on Jeff Gannon and Talon "News," the comparison leaped out at me. Although many of the stories about Thompson described his behavior as outmoded and stuck in the '60s and '70s while Aspen and the rest of the world had moved on, he in fact made the conversion to the Web quite well. He wrote a column for ESPN.com and in 2002, Shift, a Canadian digital-culture magazine, named him, along with Matt Drudge, two of the top 25 Web personalities....

There is information on the blogs that is extremely helpful to advancing a story and journalists who ignore blogs are overlooking a huge resource. Media Matters, Americablog, Kos and their contributors plucked information about Gannon, Eberle, Rove, et al, quickly and disseminated it before Talon News and GOPUSA decided to remove it from their sites. The guerilla warfare continued last week when a conservative site, The American Spectator, put up a controversial ad attacking the AARP, which was then captured and circulated on the liberal sites, eventually making it to the MSM. By the time the MSM discovered the story, the Spectator had taken down the ad.

But, as Rosen says, bloggers are more than information providers. Their anger toward and distrust of the traditional media and the political establishment are palpable. After the Gannon column ran, I received hundreds of e-mails demanding to know why the msm was ignoring the story. One of the ways the mainstream has dissed the blogs has been to label them as having agendas and not being "objective." But that doesn't make their information wrong or their points of view irrelevant. Many bloggers are people who care passionately about public issues and who are frustrated that their viewpoints aren't expressed in public debate. The frustration became so great on the right that The Washington Times and Fox News were created and found a readymade audience.

Read the rest of this post...

Frank Rich on Gannon and more

Wow.

But even Thompson might have been shocked by what's going on now. "The death of Thompson represents the passing from the Age of Gonzo to the Age of Gannon," wrote Russell Cobb in a column in The Daily Texan at the University of Texas. As he argues, today's White House press corps is less likely to be invaded by maverick talents like a drug-addled reporter from a renegade start-up magazine than by a paid propagandist like Jeff Gannon, a fake reporter for a fake news organization (Talon News) run by a bona fide Texas Republican operative who was a delegate to the 2000 Bush convention....

As a blogger, Mr. Gannon's new tactic is to encourage fellow right-wing bloggers to portray him as the victim of a homophobic left-wing witch hunt that destroyed his privacy. Given that it was Mr. Gannon himself who voluntarily exhibited his own private life by appearing on Web sites advertising his services as a $200-per-hour escort, that's a hard case to make. But it is a clever way to deflect attention from an actual sexual witch hunt conducted by his own fake news organization in early 2004. It was none other than Talon News that advanced the fictional story that a young woman "taped an interview with one of the major television networks" substantiating a rumor on the Drudge Report that John F. Kerry had had an extramarital affair with an intern. (Mr. Kerry had to publicly deny the story just as his campaign came out of the gate.) This is the kind of dirty trick only G. Gordon Liddy could dream up. Or maybe did. Mr. Gannon's Texan boss, Bobby Eberle, posted effusive thanks (for "their assistance, guidance and friendship") to both Mr. Liddy and Karl Rove on Talon News's sister site, GOPUSA, last Christmas.

Mr. Gannon, a self-promoting airhead, may well be a pawn of larger forces as the vainglorious Mr. Liddy once was. But to what end? That Kerry "intern" wasn't the only "news" Mr. Gannon helped stuff in the pipeline during an election year. A close reading of the transcripts of televised White House press conferences reveals that at uncannily crucial moments he was called on by the White House press secretary, Scott McClellan, to stanch tough questioning on such topics as Abu Ghraib and Mr. Rove's possible involvement in the outing of the C.I.A. spy Valerie Plame. We still don't know how this Zelig, using a false name, was given a daily White House pass every day for two years. Last weekend, Jim Pinkerton, a former official in the Reagan and Bush I White Houses, said on "Fox News Watch," no less, that such a feat "takes an incredible amount of intervention from somebody high up in the White House," that it had to be "conscious" and that "some investigation should proceed and they should find that out."

Given an all-Republican government, the only investigation possible will have to come from the press.

Read the rest of this post...

Open thread

What's up? Read the rest of this post...

GOP wants to spend even more on the floundering war in Iraq

So what ever happened to all of the earlier talk about Iraq taking on more responsibility? The GOP clearly thinks that the American tax payers are a bottomless pit of money and all they ever want to do is spend, spend, spend. If the tables were turned, you know that we would be hearing about throwing good money after bad. In their minds though, tacking on an additional $2BILLION just doesn't seem like much when you compare it to the already bloated $82BILLION for defense spending. Read the rest of this post...

Bush agenda receiving limited support

Looking at the numbers and the overall lack of support for his agenda, it's amazing that he managed to fool just enough people in November to win. Overall, no big surprises in the latest NYT/CBS poll though I have to wonder what people are thinking about Iraq which is enjoying higher numbers at the moment. Maybe people are just numb to the daily killing that is going on there. The Democrats have plenty to work with here and appear to be winning on a few fronts. It's time to take this Social Security issue over the top and make sure Bush is licking his wounds on this issue. It's yet another boondoggle for his friends on Wall Street at the expense of average Americans so do not let him get even a small victory on this.

Perhaps Greenspan can quit talking out of both sides of his mouth as he did again yesterday and look at what Americans are thinking. Some highlights of the poll:

• 51 percent said permitting individuals to invest part of their Social Security taxes in private accounts...
• 45 percent said Mr. Bush's private account plan would actually weaken the economic underpinnings of the nation's retirement system.
• 53 percent of those surveyed said that efforts to bring order to Iraq were going very or somewhat well...(huh?)
• 63 percent of respondents say the president has different priorities on domestic issues than most Americans.
• 50 percent said Democrats were more likely to make the right decisions about Social Security, compared with 31 percent who said the same thing about Republicans.
• 58 percent of respondents said the White House did not share the foreign affairs priorities of most Americans.
• Sixty percent of respondents - including 48 percent of self-described conservatives - said they disapproved of how Mr. Bush was managing the deficit. And 90 percent of respondents described the deficit as a very or somewhat serious problem. (ATTENTION Democrats: Issue Alert)
  

Read the rest of this post...

House Democrats up the ante on GannonGuckertPlameGate

Okay, now THIS is what real congressional action is all about. It's about fighting back. This is great.

House Democrats say they will force a vote in the House Judiciary Committee to put the Republican majority on the record with regards to investigating discredited White House correspondent Jeff Gannon who allegedly had access to confidential information, including a memorandum naming CIA operative Valerie Plame, RAW STORY has learned.

The procedure, called a Resolution of Inquiry, will be directed to Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and departing Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, senior House aides say. Ridge has jurisdiction over the Secret Service, which is responsible for presidential security; Gonzales oversees the FBI, whose databases are used for criminal background checks.

The resolution requests all documents on how Gannon was personally cleared and repeatedly allowed access to the White House. It also calls for any information the departments have on White House policies about how an applicant would go about getting clearance in general....

The Judiciary Committee will then have fourteen legislative days to decide whether to demand all records from the respective agencies relating to Gannon’s credentialing be turned over to Congress.

If the Committee does not vote after fourteen legislative days, the resolution goes to the floor for a vote of the full House.

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