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OUR FOOLISH FRENZY OVER NORTH KOREA by Victoria Samson

Fri, 20 Mar 2009 00:58:00 GMT

Rumors have been swirling for weeks now that North Korea has been preparing for another ballistic missile launch. This panic has been matched by a stratospheric level of rhetoric on both sides. But before angry words turn into hostile actions, it would help to take a step back and objectively look at what is at stake.

After reports from intelligence agencies about activities at a potential North Korean missile launch site sparked the flames, North Korean officials were eager to fan them to their advantage. Stating that what could be coming was a satellite launch, Pyongyang insisted that it had the right to be a space-faring nation. Meanwhile, officials from South Korea, Japan, and the United States were worried that North Korea was actually preparing for a test of one of its Taepo Dong ballistic missiles.

North Korea has conducted two flight tests of the Taepo Dong. The first was in August 1998, when Taepo Dong-1 was supposed to place a satellite in orbit. The satellite payload failed to separate from the missile, but this test did demonstrate the existence of a rocket’s third stage in North Korea’s missile arsenal, which potentially could give it a longer range. The Taepo Dong-1 reportedly has a reach of 2000 kilometers.

The second test launch occurred during the 2006 Fourth of July weekend, when North Korea held a series of ballistic missile tests over the course of several days. A Taepo Dong-2 failed 42 seconds into its flight. The Taepo Dong-2 is speculated to have a range of anywhere between 3,500 to 7,000 kilometers, depending on the size of the warhead it would be carrying.

So what we have is a long-range ballistic missile arsenal which North Korea has flown exactly twice in the past eleven years and which has undergone flight failures each time.

North Korea’s testing of a small nuclear weapon in October 2006 (which also fizzled) prompted the United Nations Security Council to pass Resolution 1718, which forbade North Korea from continuing its work on ballistic missile technology. This may be why Pyongyang is insisting that the impending test is only a satellite launch. In any case, its leaders have alerted several international organizations (aviation and maritime authorities) that its launch will be occurring somewhere between April 4 and April 8.

Meanwhile, Japanese officials have sent missile defense-equipped Aegis ships to within range, as have U.S. officials. Throughout all this, South Korean officials have been vociferously warning North Korea to cease its ballistic missile activities.

This vehemence is perhaps being provoked by North Korea’s actions. But it overlooks one key fact: South Korea and Japan are already within reach of other North Korean missiles. The South Korean capital of Seoul is even within range of North Korea’s artillery. This step by North Korea poses no new threat to the countries of northeast Asia. Prior to news of this latest launch, South Korea and Japan had already been fielding missile defenses. However, this deployment works only as a symbolic gesture, as those countries’ missile defense systems would very easily be overwhelmed by the massive numbers of missiles North Korea could lob at them. The missile defense solution will provide them with little to no defense, so the two countries will have to seek out a diplomatic response.

So what about the United States: Will we have to worry about losing a city to a North Korean missile? Given the breakneck pace of Pyonyang’s long-range ballistic missile development, we have time to resolve this issue before it gets out of control. But in order to do that, we too must be willing to negotiate with the North Koreans. The George W. Bush administration spent eight years trying to dictate terms to Pyongyang; by the end, even the Bush White House had realized the futility of doing so. Under the Barack Obama administration, we have the opportunity to start afresh and find a workable solution that we can live with. Otherwise, we end up playing right into North Korea’s hands and flying into a tizzy every time a Taepo Dong is test-launched.

On Signing Statements

Tue, 17 Mar 2009 14:11:00 GMT

As a candidate, Barack Obama offered withering criticism of President Bush’s signing statements — declarations that he would not enforce parts of the bills he signed. So it was encouraging when President Obama invalidated the Bush signing statements last week and explained when he would issue statements of his own.

If Mr. Obama lives up to the principles he outlined last week, he could roll back the excessive powers that Mr. Bush claimed for his presidency, but the new president quickly issued a signing statement of his own that made us wonder just how clean a break he intended to make.

Presidents have long issued signing statements, but Mr. Bush used them with unprecedented frequency and brazenness. When he signed a torture ban in 2005, he made a groundless assertion that he could override Congress and the courts on a major part. In 2006, the American Bar Association called on presidents not to issue statements that claimed the right not to enforce the law.

In principle, a president should veto a bill if he believes part of it is unconstitutional. But Mr. Obama’s memo raised a legitimate concern: that Congress these days often passes omnibus bills. If a big bill has only a few problematic parts, a president has to choose between vetoing the whole bill, or agreeing to enforce provisions he believes to be unconstitutional.

Mr. Obama said he would try to work with Congress to address constitutional concerns in advance. Once a bill passes, he said, he would object only over “interpretations of the Constitution that are well founded.”

These are good policies, but the real test will be in how they are applied. Mr. Obama should not use signing statements, as Mr. Bush did, to assert that his own interpretation of the Constitution trumps those of Congress and the courts. If he wants to claim that his objection is “well founded,” then he should be able to point to court decisions or he should find a way to get the issue into court so the judiciary can make a call.

Mr. Obama’s first signing statement objected to parts of a recent spending bill that he signed. Most of his points were not particularly troubling. Mainly, they focused on provisions that attempt to micromanage decisions that legitimately belong to the president. None comes close to Mr. Bush’s sweeping assertions of power.

Still, Mr. Obama’s statement may not be entirely innocuous. One somewhat unclear objection could be read as bumping up against the rights of executive branch whistle-blowers. In any case, the speed with which he issued the statement, and the number of provisions he objected to, raise concerns that he may use these statements too aggressively. It will bear watching.

For eight years, the Bush team did its best to disrupt the founders’ careful allocation of power among the president, Congress and the courts. President Obama’s goal should be to restore that delicate balance.

GOP LEADERS MOVE FROM OPPOSITION TO OBSTINACY TO HYPOCRISY

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 23:27:00 GMT

Monday, March 9, 2009
by Jim Hightower

“No” can be a very good word. Whether dealing with children or with Congress, a firm “uh-uh” can set the boundaries of acceptable behavior.

But the negative can pretty quickly turn you from a positive force into an obstinate grump – and no one likes those. Yet, this is the persona adopted by Republican Party leaders who're throwing up a “Stone Wall of No” to President Barack Obama’s economic recovery efforts. Not a single GOP house member, for example, voted for Obama’s $790 billion stimulus package, petulantly dismissing it as “larded with wasteful spending.”

Like what, you might ask? Well, the Republicans issued a list of what irked them in the bill. It included improved sewer systems, flood reduction projects, retrofitting federal buildings for energy conservation, and – gosh their hit list was filled with exactly the kind of job-creating, infrastructure-building, energy-saving work that America needs.

But, wait, once the bill passed anyway, hoards of the GOP’s congress critters suddenly turned from grumps to cheerleaders for such projects, claiming credit back in their districts for bringing home the bacon. Only hours after voting against the bill, for example, Rep. John Mica was bragging to his home folks in Florida that – hallelujah – they’d now be getting stimulus money for a local commuter train.

Even Gov. Bobby Jindal, The Louisiana Republican who had denounced Obama’s plan as an “eruption of spending,” was grasping for $6 billion in federal recovery money as he spoke. On national TV, Jindal praised himself for cutting taxes in Louisiana, rather than increasing spending. He didn’t mention that he now hopes to grab $2 billion from Obama’s fund to cover a state budget shortfall that his tax cuts helped create.

“No” is not an economic plan. Neither is hypocrisy.

Socialized Risk And Privatized Profit

Fri, 21 Mar 2008 10:55:00 GMT

The feudal system is alive and well here in the U.S. of A. Our Lords have managed to privatize all the profits from our hard earned investments, while socializing any associated risk. ~Tracy

March 21, 2008

Editorial

Socialized Compensation

How can one feel sorry for James Cayne? The potential losses of the chairman and former chief executive of Bear Stearns must rank up there with the biggest in modern history. The value of his stake in Bear Stearns collapsed from about $1 billion a year ago to as little as $14 million at the price JPMorgan Chase offered for the teetering bank on Sunday.

Still, Mr. Cayne was paid some $40 million in cash between 2004 and 2006, the last year on record, as well as stocks and options. In the past few years, he has sold shares worth millions more. There should be financial accountability for the man who led Bear Stearns as it gorged on dubious subprime securities to boost its profits and share price, helping to set up one of the biggest financial collapses since the savings-and-loan crisis in the 1980s. Some might argue that he should have lost it all.

But that’s not how it works. The ongoing bailout of the financial system by the Federal Reserve underscores the extent to which financial barons socialize the costs of private bets gone bad. Not a week goes by that the Fed doesn’t inaugurate a new way to provide liquidity — meaning money — to the financial system. Bear Stearns isn’t enormous. It doesn’t take deposits from the public. Yet the Fed believed that letting it implode could unleash a domino effect among other banks, and the Fed provided a $30 billion guarantee for JPMorgan to snap it up.

Compared to the cold shoulder given to struggling homeowners, the cash and attention lavished by the government on the nation’s financial titans provides telling insight into the priorities of the Bush administration. It’s not simply a matter of fairness, though. The Fed is probably right to be doing all it can think of to avoid worse damage than the economy is already suffering. But if the objective is to encourage prudent banking and keep Wall Street’s wizards from periodically driving financial markets over the cliff, it is imperative to devise a remuneration system for bankers that puts more of their skin in the game.

Financiers, of course, dispute that they are being insufficiently penalized. “I received no bonus for 2007, no severance pay, no golden parachute,” E. Stanley O’Neal, the former chief executive of Merrill Lynch, told a House committee recently. That doesn’t seem like much of a blow to Mr. O’Neal, who was removed earlier this year following gargantuan subprime-related losses.

Indeed, the pain that is being inflicted on financial-industry executives as a result of their own actions and decisions is not proving much of an encouragement. Rather, the knuckle-rapping seems only to encourage bankers to make up for any losses they may suffer by finding another way to navigate their companies, the financial system and the economy into the next maelstrom — from Internet stocks to what the industry calls zero-down, negative amortization, no-doc, adjustable-rate mortgages.

(Translation: derivatives based on incomprehensible mortgages with unpredictable interest rates given to people who have no reasonable chance of understanding them, let alone paying them back. )

Bankers operate under a system that provides stellar rewards when the investment strategies do well yet puts a floor on their losses when they go bad. They might have to forgo a bonus if investments turn sour. They might even be fired. Their equity might become worthless — or not, if the Fed feels it must step in. But as a rule, they won’t have to return the money they made in the good days when they were making all the crazy bets that eventually took their banks down.

The costs of such a lopsided system of incentives are by now clear. Better regulation of mortgage markets would help avoid repeating current excesses. But more fundamental correctives are needed to curb financiers’ appetite for walking a tightrope. Some economists have suggested making their remuneration contingent on the performance of their investments over several years — releasing their compensation gradually.

That’s an idea worth studying. Certainly, trying to put specific limits on bankers’ salaries is a nonstarter. But until bankers face a real risk of losing their shirts, they will continue blithely ratcheting up the risks to collect the rewards while letting the rest of us carry the bag when their punts go bad.

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up?

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 05:05:00 GMT

Doesn't anything socialistic make you want to throw up? (Like great public schools or health insurance for all?)

How about Jesus' Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes?

Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.

Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. ...

And so on.

Not exactly planks in a Republican platform. Not exactly Donald Rumsfeld or Dick Cheney stuff.

For some reason, the most vocal Christians among us never mention the Beatitudes. But, often with tears in their eyes, they demand that the Ten Commandments be posted in public buildings. And of course that's Moses, not Jesus. I haven't heard one of them demand that the Sermon on the Mount, the Beatitudes, be posted anywhere.

"Blessed are the merciful" in a courtroom? "Blessed are the peacemakers" in the Pentagon? Give me a break!

~Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut's Blues For America

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 12:32:00 GMT

By Kurt Vonnegut
07 January, 2006
No matter how corrupt, greedy, and heartless our government, our corporations, our media, and our religious and charitable institutions may become, the music will still be wonderful.

If I should ever die, God forbid, let this be my epitaph:

THE ONLY PROOF HE NEEDED
FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD
WAS MUSIC
Now, during our catastrophically idiotic war in Vietnam, the music kept getting better and better and better. We lost that war, by the way. Order couldn’t be restored in Indochina until the people kicked us out.

That war only made billionaires out of millionaires. Today’s war is making trillionaires out of billionaires. Now I call that progress.

And how come the people in countries we invade can’t fight like ladies and gentlemen, in uniform and with tanks and helicopter gunships?

Back to music. It makes practically everybody fonder of life than he or she would be without it. Even military bands, although I am a pacifist, always cheer me up. And I really like Strauss and Mozart and all that, but the priceless gift that African Americans gave the whole world when they were still in slavery was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason many foreigners still like us at least a little bit. That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today – jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop, and on and on – is derived from the blues.

A gift to the world? One of the best rhythm-and-blues combos I ever heard was three guys and a girl from Finland playing in a club in Krakow, Poland.

The wonderful writer Albert Murray, who is a jazz historian and a friend of mine among other things, told me that during the era of slavery in this country – an atrocity from which we can never fully recover – the suicide rate per capita among slave owners was much higher than the suicide rate among slaves.

Murray says he thinks this was because slaves had a way of dealing with depression, which their white owners did not: They could shoo away Old Man Suicide by playing and singing the Blues. He says something else which also sounds right to me. He says the blues can’t drive depression clear out of a house, but can drive it into the corners of any room where it’s being played. So please remember that.

Foreigners love us for our jazz. And they don’t hate us for our purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us now for our arrogance.

When I went to grade school in Indian apolis, the James Whitcomb Riley School #43, we used to draw pictures of houses of tomorrow, boats of tomorrow, airplanes of tomorrow, and there were all these dreams for the future. Of course at that time everything had come to a stop. The factories had stopped, the Great Depression was on, and the magic word was Prosperity. Sometime Prosperity will come. We were preparing for it. We were dreaming of the sorts of houses human beings should inhabit – ideal dwellings, ideal forms of transportation.

What is radically new today is that my daughter, Lily, who has just turned 21, finds herself, as do your children, as does George W Bush, himself a kid, and Saddam Hussein and on and on, heir to a shockingly recent history of human slavery, to an Aids epidemic, and to nuclear submarines slumbering on the floors of fjords in Iceland and elsewhere, crews prepared at a moment’s notice to turn industrial quantities of men, women, and children into radioactive soot and bone meal by means of rockets and H-bomb warheads. Our children have inherited technologies whose by-products, whether in war or peace, are rapidly destroying the whole planet as a breathable, drinkable system for supporting life of any kind.

Anyone who has studied science and talks to scientists notices that we are in terrible danger now. Human beings, past and present, have trashed the joint.

The biggest truth to face now – what is probably making me unfunny now for the remainder of my life – is that I don’t think people give a damn whether the planet goes on or not. It seems to me as if everyone is living as members of Alcoholics Anonymous do, day by day. And a few more days will be enough. I know of very few people who are dreaming of a world for their grandchildren.

Many years ago I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the second world war, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts us absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many lifeless bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

Human beings have had to guess about almost everything for the past million years or so. The leading characters in our history books have been our most enthralling, and sometimes our most terrifying, guessers.

May I name two of them? Aristotle and Hitler.

One good guesser and one bad one.

And the masses of humanity through the ages, feeling inadequately educated just like we do now, and rightly so, have had little choice but to believe this guesser or that one.

Russians who didn’t think much of the guesses of Ivan the Terrible, for example, were likely to have their hats nailed to their heads.

We must acknowledge that persuasive guessers, even Ivan the Terrible, now a hero in the Soviet Union, have sometimes given us the courage to endure extraordinary ordeals which we had no way of understanding. Crop failures, plagues, eruptions of volcanoes, babies being born dead – the guessers often gave us the illusion that bad luck and good luck were understandable and could somehow be dealt with intelligently and effectively. Without that illusion, we all might have surrendered long ago.

But the guessers, in fact, knew no more than the common people and sometimes less, even when, or especially when, they gave us the illusion that we were in control of our destinies.

Persuasive guessing has been at the core of leadership far so long, for all of human experience so far, that it is wholly unsurprising that most of the leaders of this planet, in spite of all the information that is suddenly ours, want the guessing to go on. It is now their turn to guess and guess and be listened to. Some of the loudest, most proudly ignorant guessing in the world is going on in Washington today. Our leaders are sick of all the solid information that has been dumped on humanity by research and scholarship and investigative reporting. They think that the whole country is sick of it, and they could be right. It isn’t the gold standard that they want to put us back on. They want something even more basic. They want to put us back on the snake-oil standard.

Loaded pistols are good for everyone except inmates in prisons or lunatic asylums.

That’s correct.

Millions spent on public health are inflationary.

That’s correct.

Billions spent on weapons will bring inflation down.

That’s correct.

Dictatorships to the right are much closer to American ideals than dictatorships to the left.

That’s correct.

The more hydrogen bomb warheads we have, all set to go off at a moment’s notice, the safer humanity is and the better off the world will be that our grandchildren will inherit.

That’s correct.

Industrial wastes, and especially those that are radioactive, hardly ever hurt anybody, so everybody should shut up about them.

That’s correct.

Industries should be allowed to do whatever they want to do: bribe, wreck the environment just a little, fix prices, screw dumb customers, put a stop to competition, and raid the Treasury when they go broke.

That’s correct.

That’s free enterprise.

And that’s correct.

The poor have done something very wrong or they wouldn’t be poor, so their children should pay the consequences.

That’s correct.

The United States of America cannot be expected to look after its own people.

That’s correct.

The free market will do that.

That’s correct.

The free market is an automatic system of justice.

That’s correct.

I’m kidding.

And if you actually are an educated, thinking person, you will not be welcome in Washington, DC. I know a couple of bright seventh graders who would not be welcome in Washington, DC. Do you remember those doctors a few months back who got together and announced that it was a simple, clear medical fact that we could not survive even a moderate attack by hydrogen bombs? They were not welcome in Washington, DC.

Even if we fired the first salvo of hydrogen weapons and the enemy never fired back, the poisons released would probably kill the whole planet by and by.

What is the response in Washington? They guess otherwise. What good is an education? The boisterous guessers are still in charge – the haters of information. And the guessers are almost all highly educated people. Think of that. They have had to throw away their educations, even Harvard or Yale educations.

If they didn’t do that, there is no way their uninhibited guessing could go on and on and on. Please, don’t you do that. But if you make use of the vast fund of knowledge now available to educated persons, you are going to be lonesome as hell. The guessers outnumber you – and now I have to guess – about 10 to one.

I’m going to tell you some news.

No, I am not running for President, although I do know that a sentence, if it is to be complete, must have both a subject and a verb.

Nor will I confess that I sleep with children. I will say this, though: My wife is by far the oldest person I ever slept with.

Here’s the news: I am going to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes, for a billion bucks! Starting when I was only 12 years old, I have never chain-smoked anything but unfiltered Pall Malls. And for many years now, right on the package, Brown and Williamson have promised to kill me.

But I am now 82. Thanks a lot, you dirty rats. The last thing I ever wanted was to be alive when the three most powerful people on the whole planet would be named Bush, Dick and Colon.

Our government’s got a war on drugs. That’s certainly a lot better than no drugs at all. That’s what was said about prohibition. Do you realise that from 1919 to 1933 it was absolutely against the law to manufacture, transport, or sell alcoholic beverages, and the Indiana newspaper humourist Ken Hubbard said: “Prohibition is better than no liquor at all.”

But get this: The two most widely abused and addictive and destructive of all substances are both perfectly legal.

One, of course, is ethyl alcohol. And President George W Bush, no less, and by his own admission, was smashed, or tiddley-poo, or four sheets to the wind a good deal of the time from when he was 16 until he was 40. When he was 41, he says, Jesus appeared to him and made him knock off the sauce, stop gargling nose paint.

Other drunks have seen pink elephants.

About my own history of foreign substance abuse, I’ve been a coward about heroin and cocaine, LSD and so on, afraid they might put me over the edge. I did smoke a joint of marijuana one time with Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, just to be sociable. It didn’t seem to do anything to me one way or the other, so I never did it again. And by the grace of God, or whatever, I am not an alcoholic, largely a matter of genes. I take a couple of drinks now and then and will do it again tonight. But two is my limit. No problem.

I am, of course, notoriously hooked on cigarettes. I keep hoping the things will kill me. A fire at one end and a fool at the other.

But I’ll tell you one thing: I once had a high that not even crack cocaine could match. That was when I got my first driver’s licence – look out, world, here comes Kurt Vonnegut!

And my car back then, a Studebaker as I recall, was powered, as are almost all means of transportation and other machinery today, and electric power plants and furnaces, by the most abused, addictive, and destructive drugs of all: fossil fuels.

When you got here, even when I got here, the industrialised world was already hopelessly hooked on fossil fuels, and very soon now there won’t be any left. Cold turkey.

Can I tell you the truth? I mean this isn’t the TV news is it? Here’s what I think the truth is: We are all addicts of fossil fuels in a state of denial. And like so many addicts about to face cold turkey, our leaders are now committing violent crimes to get what little is left of what we’re hooked on.

I turned 82 on November 11, 2004. What’s it like to be this old? I can’t parallel park worth a damn any more, so please don’t watch while I try to do it. And gravity has become a lot less friendly and manageable than it used to be.

When you get to my age, if you get to my age, and if you have reproduced, you will find yourself asking your own children, who are themselves middle-aged: “What is life all about?’” I have seven kids, three of them orphaned nephews.

I put my big question about life to my son the pediatrician. Dr Vonnegut said this to his doddering old dad: “Father, we are here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is.”

Sharing the Pain

Tue, 11 Mar 2008 11:47:00 GMT

By BOB HERBERT

Now that the economic crunch is reaching those near the top of the pyramid, there is finally a sense that the U.S. is facing a real crisis.

Forget about a soft landing. The stock markets continue to tumble. The dollar has weakened. The subprime mortgage debacle has morphed into a full-fledged panic. And Joe Stiglitz is telling us the war in Iraq will cost $3 trillion.

Maybe now we can stop listening to the geniuses who insisted that the way to nirvana was to ignore the broad national interest while catering to the desires of those who were already the wealthiest among us.

We have always gotten a distorted picture of how well Americans were doing from politicians and the media. The U.S. has a population of 300 million. Thirty-seven million, many of them children, live in poverty. Close to 60 million are just one notch above the official poverty line. These near-poor Americans live in households with annual incomes that range from $20,000 to $40,000 for a family of four.

It is disgraceful that in a nation as wealthy as the United States, nearly a third of the people are poor or near-poor.

Former Senator John Edwards touched on the quality of the lives of those perched precariously above the abyss of poverty in his foreword to the book, “The Missing Class: Portraits of the Near-Poor in America,” by Katherine S. Newman and Victor Tan Chen. Mr. Edwards wrote:

“When we set about fixing welfare in the 1990s, we said we were going to encourage work. Near-poor Americans do work, usually in jobs that the rest of us do not want — jobs with stagnant wages, no retirement funds, and inadequate health insurance, if they have it at all. While their wages stay the same, the cost of everything else — energy, housing, transportation, tuition — goes up.”

The economic pain and anxiety felt for so long by the poor and the near-poor has been spreading like a stain in the middle class as well. It’s hardly been a secret. But neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have stepped up to this fundamental long-term challenge, and that includes the three remaining candidates for president.

No one will tackle the crucial issue of employment in a serious way. The cornerstone of a middle-class life in America (and that means the cornerstone of the American dream) is a good job. The American dream is on life support because men and women by the millions who want very much to work — who still have in their heads the ideal of a thriving family in a nice home with maybe a picket fence — are unable to find a decent job.

For years, families have been fighting weakness on the employment front with every other option imaginable. Wives and mothers have gone to work. People have been putting in more hours and working additional jobs.

And Americans have plunged like Olympic diving champions into every form of debt they could find.

As Andrew Stern, president of the Service Employees International Union, told me some months ago: “Workers are incredibly, legitimately scared that the American dream, particularly the belief that their kids will do better, is ending.”

It is. The dream is in grave danger because the ruling elite stopped looking out for the collective interests of the society and all but stopped investing in the future. We are swimming in a vast sea of indebtedness, most of it bringing no worthwhile return.

Former Senator Bill Bradley, in a conversation the other day, described the amount of public and private indebtedness in the U.S. as “ominous.” In his book, “The New American Story,” Mr. Bradley said:

“For almost a generation, America has cheated our future and lived only in the here and now. Economic growth depends on the level of investment in both physical capital — machines, infrastructure, technology — and human capital, which consists of the combined skills and health of our work force.”

Instead of making those investments, we’ve neglected our physical and human infrastructure, squeezed the daylights out of the work force (now a fearful and demoralized lot) and tried to hide the resulting debacle behind the fool’s gold of debt and denial.

Americans save virtually nothing. They have looted the equity in their homes and driven their credit card balances to staggering heights. Meanwhile, the Bush administration has claimed colossal new standards of fiscal irresponsibility. At some point, to take just one example, someone will have to pay the $3 trillion for the war.

This craziness is not sustainable.

Without an educated and empowered work force, without sustained investment in the infrastructure and technologies that foster long-term employment, and without a system of taxation that can actually pay for the services provided by government, the American dream as we know it will expire.

And the Good News Is ...

Sat, 08 Mar 2008 12:21:00 GMT

By GAIL COLLINS

We live in a great country. Despite all our problems, this is still a nation where parents believe that if their child works hard and plays by the rules, some day he or she may grow up to be a superdelegate.

The Democrats are feeling a little blah right now. True, a six-and-a-half-week slog to the Pennsylvania primary is not the ideal way to spend the spring. But the good news is that voters who are intrigued but a little dubious about Barack Obama will get to see how he performs under pressure.

Admit it, people. When you try to envision how the politics of hope would play out in the real world, things go a bit fuzzy. How’s Obama going to get Republicans to work with Democrats on national health care when Republicans don’t want national health care? How’s he going to run a positive ship in a sea of negativity?

The latest crisis, in which Samantha Power, an Obama foreign policy adviser, got quoted calling Hillary Clinton “a monster” in an interview with The Scotsman, is the sort of thing that happens all the time in a hot presidential race. (Although we’d like to know why talking to members of the British Commonwealth seems to make this campaign go gaga.) And it’s a good sign that Obama dumped the poor woman. The last thing we need is another president with a loyalty hang-up. But it didn’t necessarily feel like a “Yes we can!” kind of moment.

So we’ll see. If Barack looks good after his fifth trip to Wilkes-Barre, then he’s the one. If not, there’s still Hillary.

And here’s the rundown:

WYOMING On Saturday, all eyes turn to Wyoming, where Democrats are choosing presidential delegates, using the popular caucus system, which worked so well in Texas that they still don’t know who won. This year, Democratic caucuses around the country have been imploding with huge crowds, long lines and massive numbers of large adults forced to sit for hours on teeny tiny chairs in elementary school cafeterias.

The good news is that you won’t get that kind of problem in Wyoming unless every single Democrat in the state decides to participate and then reproduces several times on the way to vote.

PENNSYLVANIA Trees will bud. Grass will grow. Babies will learn to walk. Easter, opening day and the first use of a baseball analogy to describe the presidential race will come and go. Then, at last, on April 22, Pennsylvanians will tell the country whether they like Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama better. It will have almost no effect on the critical delegate count. Still, we need to find meaning in our lives somewhere, and IT’S ALL UP TO PENNSYLVANIA.

For all its awesomeness, Pennsylvania’s only contribution to the presidency was James Buchanan. He was in office at the onset of the Civil War and is celebrated mainly for holding down the bottom of the Worst Presidents lists. Historians often describe him as “our only bachelor president,” although Buchanan did live for many years with William King of Alabama, who later became our only bachelor vice president. We do not hear much speculation about whether Buchanan was our first gay president because, frankly, most gay Americans would prefer to start with somebody who didn’t preside over the secession of the South.

The good news is that this really has nothing to do with the Democratic primary. But I do think a little bit of history can liven up a dreary morning.

FLORIDA AND MICHIGAN Here we have a classic Election 2008 quandary: equal parts intense controversy, great importance and utter incomprehensibility. In (very) brief, Florida and Michigan moved their primaries to January, breaking the parties’ rules. The Democratic National Committee took away both states’ presidential delegates as punishment.

So what about the voters? In Florida, although none of the candidates campaigned and there were no delegates at stake, 1.7 million Democrats still turned out for the primary, which Clinton won. We will refrain from making obvious references to Florida, disenfranchisement, presidential elections, etc. In Michigan, where Obama wasn’t even on the ballot, Clinton beat her only major opposition, the fearsome Uncommitted, by an underwhelming 55-40 percent.

Michigan and Florida say they’ll only accept a do-over if somebody else pays for it — to the tune of around $28 million. We will refrain from making the obvious references to Iraq, purple fingers, several trillion dollars, etc., etc.

Some people are proposing a compromise in the form of cost-cutting caucuses. Do not let them have any caucuses! Retirees will topple off the cafeteria chairs if you have caucuses in Florida.

Clinton says the party should just forgive and forget, and hand over her delegates.

The good news is: While Barack may understand the audacity of hope, only Hillary really gets the audacity of audacity.

How your agent spends your money......

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 15:36:00 GMT

THE WAR-BUDGET COULD BUY A LOT – by Jim Hightower

President George W. Bush has now submitted his budget to Congress, and it can be summed up by this lopsided score: Domestic needs, zero. The Pentagon, $515 billion.

The budget slashes health care programs from Medicare to the medical needs of 9-11 rescue workers. It also makes drastic cuts in such other crucial efforts as the centers for disease control, low-income energy assistance, and family literacy. But it piles half-a-trillion bucks in the Pentagon's vaults - and that does not include the money thrown down the hellhole of Iraq. Under Mr. Bush’s accounting rules, war costs are off budget, charged to the credit card of our children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and beyond.

Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, has calculated the total cost of just the first four years of the Iraq misadventure. Counting such deferred costs as interest on the war debt and long-term care for the wounded, the tab is $720 million per day.

The American Friends Service Committee has analyzed what else besides this misbegotten war America could buy with only one day's worth of the money we're spending there. For $720 million we could:

· Provide health coverage for 424,000 children.

· Build 84 brand new schools.

· Buy school lunches for 1.2 million needy kids.

· Provide 6,482 units of affordable housing.

· Pay for renewable-energy electricity in 1.3 million homes.

· Pay the annual salaries of 12,500 new classroom teachers.

· Put 35,000 students through a four-year state college.

Any of these could be had for just one day of war funding. This great country has the money to do what needs to be done - if only our "leaders" stop frittering it away on their ideological crusades.

The $2 Trillion Nightmare

Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:14:00 GMT

By BOB HERBERT

We’ve been hearing a lot about “Saturday Night Live” and the fun it has been having with the presidential race. But hardly a whisper has been heard about a Congressional hearing in Washington last week on a topic that could have been drawn, in all its tragic monstrosity, from the theater of the absurd.

The war in Iraq will ultimately cost U.S. taxpayers not hundreds of billions of dollars, but an astonishing $2 trillion, and perhaps more. There has been very little in the way of public conversation, even in the presidential campaigns, about the consequences of these costs, which are like a cancer inside the American economy.

On Thursday, the Joint Economic Committee, chaired by Senator Chuck Schumer, conducted a public examination of the costs of the war. The witnesses included the Nobel Prize-winning economist, Joseph Stiglitz (who believes the overall costs of the war — not just the cost to taxpayers — will reach $3 trillion), and Robert Hormats, vice chairman of Goldman Sachs International.

Both men talked about large opportunities lost because of the money poured into the war. “For a fraction of the cost of this war,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “we could have put Social Security on a sound footing for the next half-century or more.”

Mr. Hormats mentioned Social Security and Medicare, saying that both could have been put “on a more sustainable basis.” And he cited the committee’s own calculations from last fall that showed that the money spent on the war each day is enough to enroll an additional 58,000 children in Head Start for a year, or make a year of college affordable for 160,000 low-income students through Pell Grants, or pay the annual salaries of nearly 11,000 additional border patrol agents or 14,000 more police officers.

What we’re getting instead is the stuff of nightmares. Mr. Stiglitz, a professor at Columbia, has been working with a colleague at Harvard, Linda Bilmes, to document, among other things, some of the less obvious costs of the war. These include the obligation to provide health care and disability benefits for returning veterans. Those costs will be with us for decades.

Mr. Stiglitz noted that nearly 40 percent of the 700,000 troops from the first gulf war, which lasted just a month, have become eligible for disability benefits. The current war is approaching five years in duration.

“Imagine then,” said Mr. Stiglitz, “what a war — that will almost surely involve more than 2 million troops and will almost surely last more than six or seven years — will cost. Already we are seeing large numbers of returning veterans showing up at V.A. hospitals for treatment, large numbers applying for disability and large numbers with severe psychological problems.”

The Bush administration has tried its best to conceal the horrendous costs of the war. It has bypassed the normal budgetary process, financing the war almost entirely through “emergency” appropriations that get far less scrutiny.

Even the most basic wartime information is difficult to come by. Mr. Stiglitz, who has written a new book with Ms. Bilmes called “The Three Trillion Dollar War,” said they had to go to veterans’ groups, who in turn had to resort to the Freedom of Information Act, just to find out how many Americans had been injured in Iraq.

Mr. Stiglitz and Mr. Hormats both addressed the foolhardiness of waging war at the same time that the government is cutting taxes and sharply increasing non-war-related expenditures.

Mr. Hormats told the committee:

“Normally, when America goes to war, nonessential spending programs are reduced to make room in the budget for the higher costs of the war. Individual programs that benefit specific constituencies are sacrificed for the common good ... And taxes have never been cut during a major American war. For example, President Eisenhower adamantly resisted pressure from Senate Republicans for a tax cut during the Korean War.”

Said Mr. Stiglitz: “Because the administration actually cut taxes as we went to war, when we were already running huge deficits, this war has, effectively, been entirely financed by deficits. The national debt has increased by some $2.5 trillion since the beginning of the war, and of this, almost $1 trillion is due directly to the war itself ... By 2017, we estimate that the national debt will have increased, just because of the war, by some $2 trillion.”

Some former presidents — Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower — were quoted at the hearing on the need for accountability and shared sacrifice during wartime. But this is the 21st century. That ancient rhetoric can hardly be expected to compete for media attention, even in a time of war, with the giddy fun of S.N.L.

It’s a new era.

Horrifying and Unnecessary

Mon, 03 Mar 2008 12:53:00 GMT

In the next few days President Bush is expected to again claim the right to order mistreatment of prisoners that any civilized person would regard as torture.

Mr. Bush is planning to veto a law that would require the C.I.A. and all the intelligence services to abide by the restrictions on holding and interrogating prisoners contained in the United States Army Field Manual. Mr. Bush says the Army rules are too restrictive.

What are these burdens? In addition to a blanket prohibition of torture, the manual specifically bans:

¶ Forcing a prisoner to be naked, perform sexual acts or pose in a sexual manner.

¶ Placing hoods or sacks over the head of a prisoner, and using duct tape over the eyes.

¶ Applying beatings, electric shocks, burns or other forms of physical pain.

¶ Waterboarding.

¶ Using military working dogs.

¶ Inducing hypothermia or heat injury.

¶ Conducting mock executions.

¶ Depriving a prisoner of necessary food, water or medical care.

Such practices have long been prohibited by American laws and international treaties respected by Republican and Democratic presidents. Mr. Bush, however, declared that he was unbound by the laws of civilization in responding to the barbarism of Sept. 11, 2001. And reports soon surfaced about the abuse of prisoners at detention centers in Afghanistan, the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and secret Central Intelligence Agency prisons.

Finally, in 2006, a compliant, Republican-controlled Congress outlawed the kinds of abuse and torture that Mr. Bush’s lawyers had turned into government policy. Unfortunately, Congress applied the prohibitions only to the military, and Mr. Bush immediately made clear that he would issue whatever orders he wanted to the intelligence agencies. In response, Congress approved an amendment to the intelligence budget bill this year that binds those agencies to the same rules as the military.

Opponents of Mr. Bush’s policies on prisoners have long argued that it is immoral, dangerous and counterproductive to abuse and torture prisoners. We do not hold out much hope that the president will heed our last, urgent plea not to veto this bill.

We urge him to read the Army Field Manual, which says: “Use of torture by U.S. personnel would bring discredit upon the U.S. and its armed forces while undermining domestic and international support for the war effort. It could also place U.S. and allied personnel in enemy hands at greater risk of abuse.”

He could listen to 43 retired generals or a bipartisan coalition of 18 former members of Congress, secretaries of state and national security officials who all supported the anti-torture amendment.

He could check the testimony of Lt. Gen. Michael D. Maples, head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, who told Congress last week that waterboarding violated the Geneva Conventions.

Or he could read the letter that Gen. David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, wrote to his troops.

“Some may argue that we would be more effective if we sanctioned torture or other expedient methods to obtain information from the enemy,” General Petraeus wrote. “They would be wrong. Beyond the basic fact that such actions are illegal, history shows that they also are frequently neither useful nor necessary.”

MEET THE CONSERVATIVES &

Thu, 21 Feb 2008 15:52:00 GMT

THE REALLY, REALLY CONSERVATIVES – by Peter Montgomery

For a few days in February, the epicenter of the Republican race for president was a medium-sized ballroom in Washington, D.C., where the leaders of the right wing gathered to schmooze, lecture, and conduct some political business at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). With the election season in full swing, John McCain - who skipped the event last year - made sure to stop by and court the crowd.

McCain needs CPAC's brand of conservative, partisan foot soldiers to win. But just whose support is he seeking?

CPAC demonstrates that the conservative base of the party is much farther outside the mainstream of American thought than most people realize. Unlike the Republican National Convention, which is carefully stage managed for the glare of prime-time public consumption, CPAC is more of a family affair for the radical right.

Away from the intense media scrutiny of the national convention, the gloves come off and CPACers afford Democrats and progressives all the courtesy of a swarm of angry bees. The rhetoric of the speakers and the merchandise for sale push the boundaries of political comment, descend into vicious personal attacks and sometimes lapse into outright vulgarity.

Convention speakers included Phyllis Schlafly, noted opponent of feminism and the United Nations, and her son Andy, who gained fame as the creator of "Conservapedia," a right wing imitation of Wikipedia that denounces evolution, gay people, and liberals. Indicted former Rep. Tom Delay, who blamed the Columbine massacre on the teaching of evolution, was there to shake hands. And although CPAC organizers insisted she wasn't invited, Ann Coulter -- who has made outrageous, ugly political attacks into a thriving business model -- held a book signing. (Last year at the conference, she shocked even some of her fans by referring to Sen. John Edwards with a derogatory term for gay people.)

Yet other attendees made the big names seem positively restrained. In the exhibit hall, one could buy "Borak" shirts picturing Barack Obama as the hapless, anti-Semitic Borat character played by comic Sacha Baron Cohen; a variety of anti-Hillary Clinton paraphernalia including a Hillary Clinton nutcracker and T-shirts that couldn't be pictured in this newspaper; and items declaring, "I'd Rather Be Waterboarded than Vote for McCain."

For a candidate like McCain, who has tried to portray himself as above the partisan nastiness of the Bush administration, the whole event should have seemed downright degrading. That may be why he didn't attend the gathering last year.

This time around, the presumptive front-runner demonstrated that he was ready to pander to the right wing and fall in line. From pledging to appoint ultra-conservative judges to swearing he'd veto any bill that contained a single earmark, McCain checked off virtually every item on the right-wing wish list. He even tried backing away from his earlier stance on comprehensive immigration reform. (The last pander was either too late or too blatant even for the CPAC crowd. He was booed loudly.)

Given the current political situation, it makes sense that McCain would be trying to shore up his right-wing flank. While he has always attracted strong support from independents, polls show that after seven years of the Bush administration, a lot of independent voters are inclined towards the Democratic candidates for president, whose race is currently generating record enthusiasm and turnout. Meanwhile, Mike Huckabee's string of victories and close calls are a sign that McCain still hasn't won the hearts of his own party's base, of voters who he's going to need come fall.

So, the driver of the "straight-talk express" has shown that he can swerve, and even double-talk when it suits him. Keep an eye out for more backpedaling, and more public and private meetings at which McCain trades away his treasured reputation as a "maverick" to reassure those on the far right that he'll be the kind of president for whom they're looking.

THE ECONOMIC TREPIDATIONS OF THE RICH

Wed, 20 Feb 2008 14:01:00 GMT

– by Jim Hightower

Time for another peek into the "Lifestyles of the Rich and Cranky."

The rich would like a little more respect from you hoi polloi. They are fatigued by all this news coverage about the economic travails of the hard-working middle class. First, the subprime mortgage collapse got all the headlines, with sob stories about low-income families losing their homes. Then came the hue and cry about the hardships caused by rising gasoline prices. And now even Republican presidential candidates are trying to "feel the pain" of working stiffs.

Puh-leeze. Do reporters think that those people are the only ones suffering today? What about the pinch being felt by the rich? Do reporters not know of the downturn this past holiday season in luxury purchases at Saks Fifth Avenue, Nordstrom, and Tiffany? I tell you, it was an absolutely dreadful experience.

While the media moaned and groaned about the shopping slow-down at Target and other downscale stores, they expressed not a whit of concern about the overall sluggishness at Tiffany, for example. In the upscale suburbs of New York City, Tiffany stores had a 10 percent drop in sales! This renowned jeweler to the rich reports that sales were alarmingly soft on items like $10,000 pendants and brooches. If that's not a sign of suffering, then I don't know what is! Yet, all the clueless reporters rushed off to interview tacky Wal-Mart shoppers, as though their little purchases are going to sustain America's mighty economic machine.

The only good news for upscale marketers is that the super-rich are still buying. Tiffany reports that its sales of jewelry costing $50,000 and up continued to be strong - especially among Europeans, Asians, and Middle Eastern buyers who came here to shop, taking advantage of the weak American dollar.

Thank goodness for that, right?

WISH THE DEMS LUCK WITH IRAQ

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 06:31:00 GMT

– by Donald Kaul

After thinking it over, I’ve come to the conclusion that there’s no way we can get out of Iraq. It would be nice and all but the more I look at the plans put forward by the Democratic presidential candidates the less I see. They’re hardly more realistic than the rosy scenarios sold to us by the Republicans who got us into this mess.

Take, for example, Hillary Clinton’s plan. She’s for withdrawing rapidly but keeping a residual force in place to fight terrorists, protect the Kurds, fend off Iran and give the Iraq military a hand.

That’s quite a lot, admittedly, but as “New York Times” correspondent Michael Gordon pointed out the other day, it doesn’t go very far toward protecting the Iraqi people from insurgent violence, a key element in counter-insurgency strategy. To protect the people, Hillary says, would involve us in a civil war. Her words: “This is an Iraqi problem, we cannot save the Iraqis from themselves.”

Perhaps not, but are we really prepared to stand safe in our Iraq bases while the civilian population outside is slaughtered en masse in a war that is essentially of our creation? It’s bad enough we avert our eyes from far-away Darfur; have we really the stomach to ignore a genocide occurring in plain sight?

That doesn’t sound like any America I’m familiar with.

Then there’s Barak Obama’s blueprint, which calls for a withdrawal of troops within 16 months of his taking office, leaving behind only counter-terrorism units to prevent terrorists from setting up shop to attack us. He has said, however, he’d be willing to send troops back in as part of an international force to stop a genocide.

That sounds good too but as Mr. Gordon, a master of the inconvenient truth tells us, it will be a lot more difficult and dangerous fighting our way back into a civil war from the outside than what we’re doing now. According to one expert:

“When you go over the roads you are going to come across IEDs because you did not spend the last few months patrolling the streets to know where they are planted. You are going to run into ambushes because you don’t have any local informants working with you, because they will be the first ones targeted in the opening weeks of genocide.”

Not good.

So we move on to John Edwards’ plan, which was a variation of the other two---with a 10-month timeframe---and shared the same drawbacks.

Edwards, however, argued that only a withdrawal of our combat troops will encourage competing Iraqi leaders to reconcile their differences and forge a unity government. Yes, unless---as seems far more likely---they start choosing up sides in order to prevail in a sectarian bloodbath.

Nor will the damage be limited to the Iraqi people. I recently heard Ali Adeeb, a native of Iraq who spent three years as Baghdad news editor for “The New York Times.” He thinks abandoning Iraq now would be an unmitigated disaster, a much worse blow to our international standing than Vietnam was.

Without the United States serving as a buffer between the Shia and Sunni factions, civil war is sure to break out, offering an opportunity for al Qaida to become dominant there.

The south of Iraq would fall under the direct influence of Iran and Saudi Arabia and might very well fragment. The stability of the entire Middle East would be put at risk.

Did I mention oil? I know it’s not fashionable to think that control of natural resources is a valid reason for war (truth, justice and democracy are so much more appealing) but the fact is our economy runs on oil. Chaos in the Middle East would not be good for our economy or anyone else’s, except perhaps Venezuela and Russia.

So you see, we simply cannot afford to get out of Iraq.

On the other hand, we can’t afford to stay there either.

Thanks, Mr. Bush.

Time to Vote Contempt

Thu, 14 Feb 2008 12:05:00 GMT

Alberto Gonzales may be out, but the country is still waiting for a full accounting of how he and his White House patrons cynically politicized the Justice Department. Congress is rightly asking questions about the actions of yet another United States attorney: New Jersey’s Christopher J. Christie. The House also needs to stop procrastinating and vote to hold witnesses in contempt for refusing to testify in the wider scandal.

Federal prosecutors must be scrupulously nonpartisan. Mr. Christie, a Republican activist who got his job despite a lack of trial and criminal-law experience, has gone up to the line of acceptable behavior — and possibly crossed it.

He began an investigation of Senator Robert Menendez, a New Jersey Democrat, late in a hard-fought election campaign. The charges now appear baseless, but at the time the news provided a big boost to Mr. Menendez’s Republican opponent. Mr. Christie went against a long Justice Department presumption against opening investigations or bringing indictments right before an election, to avoid affecting the outcome.

There are also questions about Mr. Christie’s decision to award, without competitive bidding, a lucrative contract to monitor a company accused of consumer fraud. The winner? Former Attorney General John Ashcroft, an influential Republican who was once Mr. Christie’s boss. Senate and House leaders have asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate.

Some of the people who likely know the most about the role politics has played in the Bush Justice Department have defied Congressional subpoenas to testify. Joshua Bolten, the White House chief of staff, and Harriet Miers, the former White House counsel, contend that they are protected from testifying by executive privilege. That is not enough. They have a legal obligation to appear before Congress and plead that privilege to specific questions.

The House Judiciary Committee voted in July to hold Mr. Bolten and Ms. Miers in contempt. The House’s Democratic leadership has been trying to figure out the pros and cons ever since. The public needs to hear the testimony of these officials (along with Karl Rove, who is also refusing to appear), and the full House should vote as quickly as possible to hold them in contempt.

The House should also approve a resolution authorizing the Judiciary Committee to go to court to enforce the contempt citations if the current attorney general, Michael Mukasey, as expected, refuses to do so.

The stakes are high. There are people in jail today, including a former governor of Alabama, who have raised credible charges that they were put there for political reasons. Congress’s constitutionally guaranteed powers are also at risk. If Congress fails to enforce its own subpoenas, it would effectively be ceding its subpoena power. It would also be giving its tacit consent to the dangerous idea of an imperial president — above the law and beyond the reach of checks and balances.

The founders did not want that when they wrote the Constitution, and the voters who elected this Congress do not want it today.

So you think gasoline is expensive:

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 13:37:00 GMT

My wife is taking a pill called Abilify (anti-depressant). I weighed it the other day and it weighed 1/2 of a grain (7,000 grains in one pound). The single pill cost $11.80 and at that rate a pound of this medication would cost $165,200.00 or if I bought a gallon container and it weighed the as gasoline, i.e., 7# to the gallon, the cost would be $1,156,400.00 (that's a cool million dollars +). She is not eligible for Medicare Part D yet and we have no health insurance. How's that for price gouging? I won't go into the cost of health insurance and the taxes necessary to fund this boondoggle or Hillary's mandatory health care premiums when she is “elected” the first monarch of the U.S.

This "pill" is a renewable chemical compound versus non-renewable hydrocarbon fuel and the pharmaceuticals can produce thousands quickly. I think both industries and OPEC are getting the best of the consuming public, but the pharmaceuticals are really putting the screws to the people. Pharmaceuticals blame their prices on R&D, I say B.S., and if anyone believes that then they deserve a nationalized health care system/bureaucracy rather than the free market system and price and demand and supply and demand. I know it is hard for some to believe but the free enterprise competitive market system actually works.

Don’t forget that people are customers and that doctors, hospitals and pharmacies are in a “for-profit” business. Real health care went out with the Hula Hoop! If a hospital is in the non-profit business, where does all the money come from to build these fancy parking garages and arboretums adjacent to the hospital? Perhaps some price trimming for hospital rooms and regular parking lots are in order.

You can afford to buy gas still, you just can’t afford to get sick or pay for medications.

Jim ~ Somewhere in Oklahoma

Gates, Truth and Afghanistan

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 12:30:00 GMT

By the Bush administration’s standards, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was remarkably candid last week: acknowledging that popular opposition in Europe to the Iraq war was making it harder to persuade European governments to send more troops or take more risks to salvage Afghanistan.

Nearly everything about President Bush’s botched war of choice in Iraq has made it much harder to win Afghanistan’s war of necessity. The fact that Mr. Gates is permitted such truth-telling is a measure of how bad things have gotten in Afghanistan and how much the United States needs more outside help.

To help beat back a resurgent Taliban, countries like Germany, France, Spain and Italy must agree to send more combat troops and lift restrictions on where and how their forces would operate — including bars on deployments to the south where the fighting is heaviest. The United States and Europe also need to come up with more cash and a better nation-building strategy. All these problems need to be addressed before the spring when a new Taliban offensive is likely.

A NATO failure would obviously be devastating for Afghanistan’s people, but it also would be dangerous for Europe, which relies on the alliance as its principal means of deterrence and defense. The intra-NATO resentments have gotten so bitter that Canada’s prime minister, Stephen Harper, has said that he will withdraw his 2,500 troops — the Canadians have suffered heavy losses — as scheduled next year, unless other members ante up another 1,000 troops.

As Mr. Gates rightly noted, Afghanistan is not Iraq. It is a war that began in response to a terrorist attack on the United States, and the fight to defeat the Taliban is fully backed by international law, the United Nations and is a solemn legal commitment of NATO.

Europe’s failures in Afghanistan go far beyond disagreements over Iraq. Many European countries are not fully prepared to fight. The size of their armies, their training, their equipment are all insufficient for 21st-century conflicts, and their citizens are deeply casualty-averse. That is not surprising since many European leaders have not told their voters why winning in Afghanistan is essential.

Mr. Gates has tried to deliver that message this week, warning Europeans that their own security from a terrorist attack depends on NATO prevailing in Afghanistan. Europe’s own leaders need to be making that case.

Mr. Gates might get further if he also acknowledged that even before NATO got involved, Washington never had enough troops in Afghanistan or a coherent strategy for stabilizing the country. That is probably too much to ask from Mr. Gates, who on Monday proved that he is still a full team player by suggesting that troop reductions in Iraq may not come down much below their presurge levels.

Having told at least one difficult truth on his way to Europe, Mr. Gates should be prepared to tell a few more when gets home. He can start by telling President Bush that a good part of the problem in Afghanistan is manufactured in Pakistan, which continues to give Al Qaeda and the Taliban sanctuary in its border regions. Mr. Bush needs a Pakistan strategy — and for that Europe can’t be blamed. Mr. Gates should also tell the president that so long as American forces are tied down in an unwinnable war in Iraq, there is little hope of winning in Afghanistan.

Darkness and Light

Wed, 06 Feb 2008 15:52:00 GMT

By MAUREEN DOWD

Hillary Clinton denounced Dick Cheney as Darth Vader, but she did not absorb the ultimate lesson of the destructive vice president: Don’t become so paranoid that you let yourself be overwhelmed by a dark vision.

I think Hillary truly believes that she and Bill are the only ones tough enough to get to the White House. Jack Nicholson endorsed her as “the best man for the job,” and she told David Letterman that “in my White House, we’ll know who wears the pantsuits.” But her pitch is the color of pitch: Because she has absorbed all the hate and body blows from nasty Republicans over the years, she is the best person to absorb more hate and body blows from nasty Republicans.

Darkness seeking darkness. It’s an exhausting specter, and the reason that Tom Daschle, Ted Kennedy, Claire McCaskill and so many other Democrats are dashing for daylight and trying to break away from the pathological Clinton path.

“I think we should never be derisive about somebody who has the ability to inspire,” Senator McCaskill told David Gregory on MSNBC on Tuesday. “You know, we’ve had some dark days in this democracy over the last seven years, and today the sun is out. It is shining brightly. I watch these kids, these old and young, these black and white, 20,000 of them, pour into our dome in St. Louis Saturday night, and they feel good about being an American right now. And I think that’s something that we have to capture.”

Tuesday’s voting showed only that the voters, like moviegoers, don’t want a pat ending. Even though Hillary reasserted her strength, corraling New York, California and Kennedy country Massachusetts, she and Obama will battle on in chiaroscuro. Her argument to the Democratic base has gone from a subtext of “You owe me,” or more precisely, “Bill owes me and you owe him,” to a subtext of “Obambi will fold at the first punch from the right.”

Hillary’s strategist Mark Penn argued last week that because the voters have “very limited information” about Obama, the Republican attack machine would tear him down and he would lose the support of independents. Then Penn tried to point the way to negative information on Obama, just to show that Obama wouldn’t be able to survive Republicans pointing the way to negative information.

As she talked Sunday to George Stephanopoulos, a former director of the formidable Clinton war room, Hillary’s case boiled down to the fact that she can be Trouble, as they say about hard-boiled dames in film noir, when Republicans make trouble.

“I have been through these Republican attacks over and over and over again, and I believe that I’ve demonstrated that much to the dismay of the Republicans, I not only can survive, but thrive,” she said.

And on Tuesday night she told supporters, “Let me be clear: I won’t let anyone Swift-boat this country’s future.”

Better the devil you know than the diffident debutante you don’t. Better to go with the Clintons, with all their dysfunction and chaos — the same kind that fueled the Republican hate machine — than to risk the chance that Obama would be mauled like a chew toy in the general election. Better to blow off all the inspiration and the young voters, the independents and the Republicans that Obama is attracting than to take a chance on something as ephemeral as hope. Now that’s Cheney-level paranoia.

Bill is propelled by Cheneyesque paranoia, as well. His visceral reaction to Obama — from the “fairy tale” line to the inappropriate Jesse Jackson comparison — is rooted less in his need to see his wife elected than in his need to see Obama lose, so that Bill’s legacy is protected. If Obama wins, he’ll be seen as the closest thing to J. F. K. since J. F. K. And J. F. K. is Bill’s hero.

For much of the campaign, when matched against Hillary in debates, the Illinois senator seemed out of his weight class. But he has moved up to heavyweight, even while losing five pounds as he has raced around the country. The big question is: Can he go from laconic to iconic to bionic? Will he have the muscle to take on the opposition, from Billary to the Republican hate machine to the terrorists overseas?

“I try to explain to people, I may be skinny but I’m tough,” he told a crowd of more than 15,000 in Hartford the other night, with the Kennedys looking on. “I’m from Chicago.”

The relentless Hillary has been the reticent Obama’s tutor in the Political School for Scandal. He is learning how to take a punch and give one back. When she presents her mythic narrative, the dragon she has slain is the Republican attack machine. Obama told me he doesn’t think about mythic narratives, and Tuesday night in Chicago he was reaching up for “a hymn that will heal this nation and repair the world.”

But, if he wants to be president, he will still have to slay the dragon. And his dragon is the Clinton attack machine, which emerged Tuesday night, not invincible but breathing fire.

Partying On

Mon, 04 Feb 2008 16:08:00 GMT

Coming to the aid of one’s party has been given a freshly cynical meaning by the House ethics committee.

Congress’s new ethics rules ban deep-pocketed corporate lobbyists from “honoring” members with lavish V.I.P. galas at the presidential nominating conventions. As originally written, the rules instructed House members to firmly decline the honor. But as newly loopholed by the committee, the rules will only ban a single lawmaker from being so honored. Representatives are free to belly up to fetes honoring groups of them.

This wayward guidance — from a committee that usually sits mute as a mesa — has already alerted lobbyists to the possibilities of large-scale influence-buying at the summer conventions in Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul. Instead of “honoring Representative Bob Forehead,” why not do the ethical thing and “honor Representative Bob Forehead’s state delegation” with an even bigger blast? The interpretation mocks the Democratic majority’s vaunted new ethics posture. It would bless, not bar, en suite snuffling at the trough.

To make things even easier, the committee advises that only parties “directly” financed by lobbyists should be forbidden. Is there a K Street practitioner worth his shingle who can’t arrange bank-shot financing through third-party groups?

The Senate Ethics Committee has yet to issue its own verdict on what’s allowable, which means it still has a chance to one-up the House’s muddled ethicists. Initially, the office of the Senate secretary (as well as the House clerk) issued a correct — that is to say, no loopholes — interpretation of the no-partying rule.

We urge the Senate committee to do no less, particularly since three of the four leading presidential contenders are senators proclaiming their devotion to change.

The Edwards Effect

Fri, 01 Feb 2008 13:44:00 GMT

By PAUL KRUGMAN

So John Edwards has dropped out of the race for the presidency. By normal political standards, his campaign fell short.

But Mr. Edwards, far more than is usual in modern politics, ran a campaign based on ideas. And even as his personal quest for the White House faltered, his ideas triumphed: both candidates left standing are, to a large extent, running on the platform Mr. Edwards built.

To understand the extent of the Edwards effect, you have to think about what might have been.

At the beginning of 2007, it seemed likely that the Democratic nominee would run a cautious campaign, without strong, distinctive policy ideas. That, after all, is what John Kerry did in 2004.

If 2008 is different, it will be largely thanks to Mr. Edwards. He made a habit of introducing bold policy proposals — and they were met with such enthusiasm among Democrats that his rivals were more or less forced to follow suit.

It’s hard, in particular, to overstate the importance of the Edwards health care plan, introduced in February.

Before the Edwards plan was unveiled, advocates of universal health care had difficulty getting traction, in part because they were divided over how to get there. Some advocated a single-payer system — a k a Medicare for all — but this was dismissed as politically infeasible. Some advocated reform based on private insurers, but single-payer advocates, aware of the vast inefficiency of the private insurance system, recoiled at the prospect.

With no consensus about how to pursue health reform, and vivid memories of the failure of 1993-1994, Democratic politicians avoided the subject, treating universal care as a vague dream for the distant future.

But the Edwards plan squared the circle, giving people the choice of staying with private insurers, while also giving everyone the option of buying into government-offered, Medicare-type plans — a form of public-private competition that Mr. Edwards made clear might lead to a single-payer system over time. And he also broke the taboo against calling for tax increases to pay for reform.

Suddenly, universal health care became a possible dream for the next administration. In the months that followed, the rival campaigns moved to assure the party’s base that it was a dream they shared, by emulating the Edwards plan. And there’s little question that if the next president really does achieve major health reform, it will transform the political landscape.

Similar if less dramatic examples of leadership followed on other key issues. For example, Mr. Edwards led the way last March by proposing a serious plan for responding to climate change, and at this point both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are offering far stronger measures to limit emissions of greenhouse gases than anyone would have expected to see on the table not long ago.

Unfortunately for Mr. Edwards, the willingness of his rivals to emulate his policy proposals made it hard for him to differentiate himself as a candidate; meanwhile, those rivals had far larger financial resources and received vastly more media attention. Even The Times’s own public editor chided the paper for giving Mr. Edwards so little coverage.

And so Mr. Edwards won the arguments but not the political war.

Where will Edwards supporters go now? The truth is that nobody knows.

Yes, Mr. Obama is also running as a “change” candidate. But he isn’t offering the same kind of change: Mr. Edwards ran an unabashedly populist campaign, while Mr. Obama portrays himself as a candidate who can transcend partisanship — and given the economic elitism of the modern Republican Party, populism is unavoidably partisan.

It’s true that Mr. Obama has tried to work some populist themes into his campaign, but he apparently isn’t all that convincing: the working-class voters Mr. Edwards attracted have tended to favor Mrs. Clinton over Mr. Obama.

Furthermore, to the extent that this remains a campaign of ideas, it remains true that on the key issue of health care, the Clinton plan is more or less identical to the Edwards plan. The Obama plan, which doesn’t actually achieve universal coverage, is considerably weaker.

One thing is clear, however: whichever candidate does get the nomination, his or her chance of victory will rest largely on the ideas Mr. Edwards brought to the campaign.

Personal appeal won’t do the job: history shows that Republicans are very good at demonizing their opponents as individuals. Mrs. Clinton has already received the full treatment, while Mr. Obama hasn’t — yet. But if he gets the nod, watch how quickly conservative pundits who have praised him discover that he has deep character flaws.

If Democrats manage to get the focus on their substantive differences with the Republicans, however, polls on the issues suggest that they’ll have a big advantage. And they’ll have Mr. Edwards to thank.

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