Maine Owl

Rep. Chellie Pingree discusses recent South Asia trip:


h/t Gerald at Turn Maine Blue

Here the tenor of Representative Pingree's remarks on Iraq is a little different (in a good way) than what I read in the newspaper yesterday. Primarily she omits the "victory" formulation here. Still, I think in speaking of improvements in the immediate situation, she avoids addressing the overall devastation. You'll see what I mean if you read Dahr Jamail's SITE. Dahr has been in Iraq for a month now.

Meanwhile, we must be very skeptical about "withdrawal" plans, as the Pentagon is fixing to push against withdrawal.

New Maine 1st District Representative unimpressive in borderline jingoistic comments after recent South Asia trip

If anything, Representative Chellie Pingree has a conventional Democrat-Obama position on the current U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But she did run on a platform suggesting she would be a stronger anti-war advocate, stating,

Pingree: We must end the war now. Congress must stop funding the war and rescind its authorization if the administration refuses to make plans for immediate withdrawal. We can't continue to squander our resources on the worst foreign policy mistake in our country's history. Leaving will be complicated, but staying only continues the tragic loss of our soldiers, Iraqi citizens, and almost unthinkable amounts of money.

Now that she is in office and traveling to the Pentagon beachheads, the tune is different. In a story in today's Bangor Daily News--"Pingree returns to U.S. after Middle East visit" (apparently not yet on line, follow-up to this one), Pingree is quoted saying that she is "closer to understanding what U.S. forces need to do to achieve victory in Iraq" and that "U.S. military and reconstruction campaign in Iraq has achieved some success."

These lines could have been written for George W. Bush.

What about the prospects for the "immediate withdrawal" she ran on? According to the BDN story, "She said it is too soon to tell, however, whether democracy will stand on its own there after American forces withdraw. 'That was one of the key questions that we asked over and over again: What is going to slide back when we leave, and what can we achieve with our limited resources? ... I don't think I came to a final answer on this, but I got a lot of information that is going to help make a final decision."

Again, this isn't much of an anti-war position. No longer is there mention of "tragic loss of our soldiers, Iraqi citizens." In fact, it is extremely disheartening that Pingree could return from Iraq and fail to communicate concern about the devastation of the Iraqi people and looting of Iraqi and reconstruction resources under U.S. occupation, preferring instead to use the Bush-McCain frame of military "victory."

It's not like she never makes such comments about the failure of military solutions, as reported HERE: "If there's one thing we've learned, it's that we can't do this all by military force, ... brutalizing people with weapons isn't going to repair what's going on," Pingree said.

But I think she is going to have to do a lot better than adopting the jingoism and paternalism implicit in these American military adventures.

When I saw THIS story yesterday, "Iran ready to build nuclear weapon, analysts say," with what is written to be "enough low-enriched uranium for a single nuclear weapon," I had exactly the same reaction Juan Cole had,

Iran cannot construct nuclear bombs with uranium enriched only to less than 4%. It needs to be enriched to something like 90% to make a bomb. So all the silly articles on Friday about how Iran now has enough enriched uranium to make a bomb are just illiterate. Moreover, the report in question actually says that Iran is slowing its enrichment activities.

The whole framing of Mideast conflict around the one highly speculative issue of Iran maybe one day building a nuclear weapon both the Iranians themselves and U.S. intelligence steadfastly have stated they are not doing, is completely silly.

Iran definitely occupies a strong strategic position that is under the skin of both Israel and the United States. But let's compare--Israel has hundreds of nuclear weapons pointed at Iran in full-blown triad delivery configuration. God knows how many nukes the U.S. has available in the Middle East. Unlike Israel, Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty (NPT) and, according to U.S. intelligence agencies in the National Intelligence Estimate (pdf) made public in December 2007, "Tehran halted its nuclear weapons program."

Both Israel and the U.S. have been on a rampage of invasions and military actions in the region throughout the last decade. Just last week it was revealed by the very conservative U.K. Daily Telegraph that "Israel has launched a covert war against Iran as an alternative to direct military strikes against Tehran's nuclear programme, US intelligence sources have revealed... The most dramatic element of the 'decapitation' programme is the planned assassination of top figures involved in Iran's atomic operations."

Good grief! Just who is pursuing the more dangerous policies, Iran or U.S./Israel? If it was we who faced the types of threats closing in on Iran, what would we do? I'll leave that to readers' imaginations.

Last point. It's not too difficult to agree with Juan Cole's prediction that the incoming Likud government under Netanyahu will spray "inflammatory propaganda about how dangerous Iran is." A look at reality, by contrast, shows that Likud (or the U.S. for that matter) "never met a war of aggression they did not like."

Sean Hannity, NOT good people


Stanford Coins & Bullion, a business of recently-exposed Madoff-style criminal Allen Stanford, was promoted by most worst Hannity in his own voice on his radio show

I'd like to think this isn't an angry blog, but this kind of predation really irks me. From Huffington Post:

"I couldn't believe it when I heard the advertisement," said Michael Levine, a regular Hannity listener from Westchester County, New York.

He called the radio station on Tuesday to inform them Stanford had been implicated in what the SEC termed "massive, ongoing" fraud. "They told me they had no idea what I was talking about," Levine told the Huffington Post.

At the very least this shows the carelessly venal nature of the Hannity enterprise. It shows that Hannity is as unreliable in his commercial offerings as he has always been in his political ones. Maybe some other Hannity listeners will begin to catch on to this fraud like Mr. Levine has.

Meanwhile, Stanford, perpetrator of a $9.2 billion financial fraud, was found on the lam by the FBI in Fredericksburg, Va., and served with court papers.

More on rampant American corruption

Proper context from Patrick Cockburn.

A 'fraud' bigger than Madoff
Senior US soldiers investigated over missing Iraq reconstruction billions
By Patrick Cockburn in Sulaimaniyah, Northern Iraq - Monday, 16 February 2009

In what could turn out to be the greatest fraud in US history, American authorities have started to investigate the alleged role of senior military officers in the misuse of $125bn (£88bn) in a US -directed effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fall of Saddam Hussein. The exact sum missing may never be clear, but a report by the US Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction (SIGIR) suggests it may exceed $50bn, making it an even bigger theft than Bernard Madoff's notorious Ponzi scheme. ...

Despite the vast sums expended on rebuilding by the US since 2003, there have been no cranes visible on the Baghdad skyline except those at work building a new US embassy and others rusting beside a half-built giant mosque that Saddam was constructing when he was overthrown.

Last year I wondered how the U.S. embassy in Baghdad -- "empire's architecture" -- "doesn't look like a huge insult and provocation to every decent Iraqi."

Former Maine drug warrior indicted in federal child porn case.

George Will is at it again, waving his shallow understanding of the history of the development of climate science in order to pound politically President Obama's Energy Secretary, Dr. Steven Chu, and others who would argue that action must be taken globally to reduce fossil fuel burning.

Dark Green Doomsayers
By George F. Will
Washington Post - Sunday, February 15, 2009 - Page B07

... Others anticipated "a full-blown 10,000-year ice age" involving "extensive Northern Hemisphere glaciation" (Science News, March 1, 1975, and Science magazine, Dec. 10, 1976, respectively). The "continued rapid cooling of the Earth" (Global Ecology, 1971) meant that "a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery" (International Wildlife, July 1975). "The world's climatologists are agreed" that we must "prepare for the next ice age" (Science Digest, February 1973). Because of "ominous signs" that "the Earth's climate seems to be cooling down," meteorologists were "almost unanimous" that "the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century," perhaps triggering catastrophic famines (Newsweek cover story, "The Cooling World," April 28, 1975)

Will scarcely comprehends the context of the state of knowledge about climate change during past decades. Spencer Weart's "History of Global Warming" could be helpful. In a nutshell: There has been a massive paradigm shift since the 1970s with respect to understanding rapid climate change. Major discoveries were made in climate history during the 80s and 90s showing just how fast global-scale changes can occur. Furthermore, consensus on the likely direction of rapid change has developed since then--consensus that did not exist when those 70s articles appeared, as a decent reading of the better articles Will himself cites would reveal.

Others have listed the many errors in Will's climate-related statements. However, no one seems to be dealing with this:

Will: Speaking of experts, in 1980 Paul Ehrlich, a Stanford scientist and environmental Cassandra who predicted calamitous food shortages by 1990, accepted a bet with economist Julian Simon. When Ehrlich predicted the imminent exhaustion of many nonrenewable natural resources, Simon challenged him: Pick a "basket" of any five such commodities, and I will wager that in a decade the price of the basket will decline, indicating decreased scarcity. Ehrlich picked five metals -- chrome, copper, nickel, tin and tungsten -- that he predicted would become more expensive. Not only did the price of the basket decline, the price of all five declined.

An expert Ehrlich consulted in picking the five was John Holdren, who today is President Obama's science adviser. Credentialed intellectuals, too -- actually, especially -- illustrate Montaigne's axiom: "Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know."

Will, of course, presents here the cornucopian view that mineral resources do not deplete, but rather expand over time because they are "created" by entrepreneurship and market economic forces.

My view is that the cornucopian position is crazy talk. Oil and minerals in the ground are finite. Period. Civilizations collapse when the key ingredients they are based on run out. Paul Ehrlich's bet was based on mistaken assumptions about the time scale and economic conditions over which prices will respond to depletion. This is not something anyone easily can predict. The silly incident does not repeal depletion, or prove that John Holdren will be a bad science adviser.

Will should take to heart the axiom he quotes: "Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know."

Biggest anti-war protest in world history (repost)


Clips from ultra-frigid, 500-person anti-war march & rally in Bangor, Maine, February 15, 2003 (Video courtesy Bill Phillips)


Almost ten total minutes of coverage from Ch. 5 and Ch. 2, Bangor, 11 pm reports on February 15, 2003; Be sure to watch through to the end for Ch. 2's "gas mask" story!

This all speaks for itself. Channel 5's reporter had it right: "The message of the Mainers, 'Stop the rush to war, join the 80% of the world's population that disagree with the president's war policy, and disarm Iraq through peaceful, multilateral policies.'"

GO TO THE LINK below for a page of stunning photos showing what a representative sample of that "80%" of the world's population looked like on that day:

11 million march against war

This was no failure by any means. Everything we said then about the prevarication of Colin Powell and the rest, and the consequences of the regime going ahead and ignoring us as they did do, sadly, has come true. But Bush did not get his "second resolution," Turkey could not allow the "northern attack." There is no taste today for attacking Iran. ... The American empire, while by no means crippled, took a necessary blow that day that resonates over the six years since. It is a cornerstone day of history.

This item from the old blog 100% confirmed by Gitmo guard. It wasn't even close to the worst of it:


Gitmo haircut: Humiliation using belittling and denial of cultural and religious practice routine in US detention

Scott Horton (h/t Atrios):

Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees ...

... a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking.

Here are links to the extensive catalog of posts on U.S.-inflicted torture associated with its Terror War:

• Torture posts at Deep Blade Journal
• Torture posts at Maine Owl

New York Times now interested in war "graft" and "bribes" as military heads (slowly) begin to roll

It's been over five years since I began covering how a major objective of the U.S. occupation has been to steal Iraq's money and also that of the U.S. taxpayer. In fact, the "privatization" (theft) program for Iraq was the topic of my second-ever blog post.

Indeed the occupation was set up for theft through legal immunity. This allowed, during 2003 and 2004, $20 billion of Iraqi oil revenue, including billions left in the coffers by Saddam Hussein, to be flat out misappropriated and disappeared after the U.S. gained legal control of the country's government through U.N. Security Counsel resolution 1483 in May 2003.

Firms like Custer-Battles long have been under scrutiny, first by only a handful of Democratic lawmakers. At that time during late 2004 and early 2005, laughable hysteria about the U.N. Oil-for-Food program was the faux raison d'etre of Republican "investigations" of the day.

The horrid loser Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota working under the animated full-committee leadership of Maine's Susan Collins operated a subcommittee more interested in proven-phony reports on Kofi Annan and British politician George Galloway than the American criminals operating right under their noses. Despite pleas from leading Democrats, Collins actively refused to investigate, failing to see the irony in her indignation over the by-comparison puny issues of corruption in the Oil-for-Food program during the then in-the-past Saddam Hussein period.

The story of just who was responsible for this American culture of stealing is being filled in now years later. It doesn't look good for the U.S. military and those who were charged to supervise the occupation:

Inquiry on Graft in Iraq Focuses on U.S. Officers
By JAMES GLANZ, C.J. CHIVERS and WILLIAM K. RASHBAUM
Published: February 14, 2009

Federal authorities examining the early, chaotic days of the $125 billion American-led effort to rebuild Iraq have significantly broadened their inquiry to include senior American military officers who oversaw the program, according to interviews with senior government officials and court documents. ...

Former American officials describe payments to local contractors from huge sums of cash dumped onto tables and stuffed into sacks as if it were Halloween candy. ...

The story is full of shady characters, suicide, and murder on the highways of Iraq. "An extraordinary element of the current investigation is a voice from beyond the grave."

The Times produces a quote from associates of the killed man describing the "clandestine delivery of bribes" as "a classic New York scenario." I bet you didn't know we sent Pauley Walnuts to occupy the oil-rich country.

And Collins? She's naked on this issue. But you wouldn't know it from the way she is allowed in local media to "dismiss" criticism of her performance as "political gamesmanship."

"End the Honeymoon"

I totally agree with this call for agitation from political analyst John B. Judis:

Judis: I think the main reason that Obama is having trouble is that there is not a popular left movement that is agitating for him to go well beyond where he would even ideally like to go. Sure, there are leftwing intellectuals like Paul Krugman who are beating the drums for nationalizing the banks and for a $1 trillion-plus stimulus. But I am not referring to intellectuals, but to movements that stir up trouble among voters and get people really angry. Instead, what exists of a popular left is either incapable of action or in Obama's pocket.

Somebody has to start pushing back on Obama on two immediate things: (1) He must stop just giving his Republican opponents room to maneuver. Republican politicians who are inexorably wedded to the disastrous status quo that they relentlessly created for three decades will not be of any use in repairing the economy the bulk of the population must live in. (2) Obama must stop allowing total sway to bad actors like Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, whose purpose seems to be to enable his rich friends in the banking industry to drain the Treasury in order to torch bales of cash in what will be an ill-fated program to re-inflate the bubble economy under the guise of a "free market" solution that is psychologically preferred.

A full elucidation of this second point is available from Michael Hudson, professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City and economic adviser to former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich in a Counterpunch piece HERE:

Hudson: For Wall Street, free markets are "free” of public regulation against predatory lending; “free” of taxing the wealthy so as to shift the burden onto labor; “free” for the financial sector to wrap itself around the “real” economy like parasitic ivy around a tree to extract the surplus.

This is a travesty of freedom. ...

There is an alternative to ward all this off, and it is the classic definition of freedom from debt peonage and predatory credit. The only real solution to today’s debt overhang is a debt write-down. Until this occurs, debt service will crowd out spending on goods and services and there will be no recovery. Debt deflation will drag the economy down while assets are transferred further into the hands of the wealthiest 10 percent of the population, operating via the financial sector.

If Obama means what he says, he would use his office as a bully pulpit to urge repeal the present harsh creditor-oriented bankruptcy law sponsored by the banks and credit-card companies [and pushed through by then-Senator Joe Biden. Editors]. He would campaign to restore the long-term trend of laws favoring debtors rather than creditors, and introduce legislation to restore the practice of writing down debts to reflect the debtor’s ability to pay, imposing market reality to debts that are far in excess of realistic valuations.

There you have it. Somebody has to reign in the bankers' desire to wipe their asses with one last pile of our public resources while we sink permanently into the depths of debt slavery.

Both Gerald at Turn Maine Blue and Collins Watch have carried good posts on the actions of Maine's U.S. Senator Susan Collins in the last few days leading up to the apparent economic stimulus package deal finalized by the Congressional conferees.

Citing a post at Talking Points Memo, Gerald lays out the odd interest Collins has placed in stripping whistleblower protections from the package, she was the "'central roadblock' to passing the protections." Just go read this.

Also, Collins Watch starting HERE traces several of the Maine senator's positions during the stimulus negotiations. Perhaps most shocking is the position Collins adopted towards LIHEAP, the fuel assistance program that is an absolute lifeline for many Mainers:

she's championing a version of the bill with no LIHEAP funding and $3.3 billion less in weatherization--while rejecting the version that includes those funds as "bloated."

As Contrapositive writes, draw your own conclusions.

I guess you have to credit Collins along with Olympia Snowe and Arlen Spector of Pennsylvania as the only three Republicans in the entire Congress who were even the slightest bit interested in breaking with failed Reaganism while trying to do something to direct government help for people in need and also use the power of the government to put the economy on a more positive course over the next couple of years.

The Bangor Daily News today ran follow-up pieces on the late James G. Cummings and his wingnut activities collecting materials evidently to have been used for construction of a radiological "dirty bomb."

The second story featured some comments from my former thesis adviser, Dr. Tom Hess of the University of Maine Department of Physics and Astronomy,

The Bangor Daily News reported this week that authorities seized a number of potentially hazardous materials, including uranium and thorium, from the man's home on Dec. 9, 2008, the night he was killed. He also had literature on how to construct dirty bombs.

"If you have a University of Maine invoice, I suppose it's very easy to get materials," said C. Thomas Hess, a physics professor. "But most materials, particularly anything that is made by some sort of chemical reaction [such as uranium], is strictly regulated."

However, the article ended up being a little unsatisfying because it did not address specifically the availability of the much more powerful dirty bomb materials: cesium-137, strontium-90 and cobalt-60.

When I worked with Dr. Hess in the 80s, we could get small amounts of solutions containing these radionuclides quite easily. The folks who tested the roofs of University buildings for leaks had even stronger solutions containing cesium-137. According to the reports, Cummings did not actually possess these powerfully radioactive fission products (i.e. nuclear waste material), but rather much-less-radioactive samples of the heavy elements uranium and thorium. I guess that's comforting.

My question for Dr. Hess is, is it now harder to obtain samples of fission products that would make a vastly more powerful and "disruptive" dirty bomb?

Update: Something kinda obvious that should have occurred to me is that to make a really strong "dirty bomb" using enough fission product to cause a lot of trouble, the device would have to be heavily shielded prior to detonation. Otherwise it would be a problem for the bomber, and everyone along the line who might handle the material. You need some sort of "cask" to ship that stuff.

While we're on the subject of wingnuttia and the excellent coverage of it at Orcinus, Sara writes that the extreme nutjob who rampaged with a gun last summer at a Unitarian Universalist church in Tennessee, killing two parishioners, has been sentenced to life.

James Adkisson by all accounts is an extremely angry person, inspired and animated by right-wing talk radio. He managed to put his anger into words in sort of a suicide note/manifesto quoted in the Orcinus piece:

Adkisson: Know this if nothing else: This was a hate crime. I hate the damn left-wing liberals. There is a vast left-wing conspiracy in this country & these liberals are working together to attack every decent & honorable institution in the nation, trying to turn this country into a communist state. Shame on them....

This was a symbolic killing. Who I wanted to kill was every Democrat in the Senate & House, the 100 people in Bernard Goldberg's book. I'd like to kill everyone in the mainstream media. But I know those people were inaccessible to me. I couldn't get to the generals & high ranking officers of the Marxist movement so I went after the foot soldiers, the chickenshit liberals that vote in these traitorous people. Someone had to get the ball rolling. I volunteered. I hope others do the same. It's the only way we can rid America of this cancerous pestilence."

I thought I'd do something good for this Country Kill Democrats til the cops kill me....Liberals are a pest like termites. Millions of them Each little bite contributes to the downfall of this great nation. The only way we can rid ourselves of this evil is to kill them in the streets. Kill them where they gather. I'd like to encourage other like minded people to do what I've done. If life aint worth living anymore don't just kill yourself. do something for your Country before you go. Go Kill Liberals.

This man seems to be the fruition of the kind of thinking found at Palin rallies last fall.

Posted at Wikileaks: Washington DC Regional Threat and Analysis Center report re Inauguration, 16 Jan 2009: "9 December 2008 Discovery of Radiological Dispersal Device Components, Literature, and Radioactive Material at the Maine Residence of an Identified Deceased US Person"

Quite a front-page story in the Bangor Daily News today:

Report: 'Dirty bomb' parts found in slain man's home
Agency says radioactive materials recovered
in home of man allegedly slain by his wife
By Walter Griffin- BDN Staff

BELFAST, Maine — James G. Cummings, who police say was shot to death by his wife two months ago, allegedly had a cache of radioactive materials in his home suitable for building a "dirty bomb." ...

[An FBI field intelligence report from the Washington Regional Threat and Analysis Center] says that four 1-gallon containers of 35 percent hydrogen peroxide, uranium, thorium, lithium metal, thermite, aluminum powder, beryllium, boron, black iron oxide and magnesium ribbon were found in the home.

Also found was literature on how to build "dirty bombs" and information about cesium-137, strontium-90 and cobalt-60, radioactive materials. The FBI report also stated there was evidence linking James Cummings to white supremacist groups.

Curiously, the report carefully avoids the term "terrorist" when describing the slain man. (His wife has not been charged yet.)

The report fails to distinguish the characteristics of what was found at the site, versus what was in literature there. While beryllium is a deadly chemical poison and uranium and thorium are poisonous and somewhat radioactive, none of those are big radiological dangers.

On the other hand, the stuff mentioned that evidently the guy didn't have--cesium-137, strontium-90 and cobalt-60--are extremely radioactive products of fission (i.e. nuclear waste). Tiny amounts of these substances can kill at moderate distance if concentrated enough. But, the guy was only reading about those. I suppose he could not get them from the same sources the other stuff came from. That's comforting, I guess.

Thanks to the Bangor Daily News for giving this story the weight it deserves with a front-page banner headline. As one can read about constantly at Orcinus, the far more important terror/assassination threat in this country comes from right-wing and neo-nazi pseudo fascists. The deceased man was said to be "very upset" when Barack Obama was elected president, according to the BDN report.

Greenwald: Obama Administration FAILS first test on civil liberties

Rachel Maddow had a good segment on the Obama continuation of Bush "state secrets" claims with regard to rendition and torture last night with ACLU attorney Ben Wizner:

Wizner: And I think that this administration would prefer to sweep the last seven years under the rug and move on and get along. The problem is not a single torture victim, and there are hundreds, has yet had his day in court.

And you did a segment on prosecution - I understand that‘s a controversial issue. The other side of the coin is civil liability. And if torture victims aren't going to be able to go into court at all - and bear in mind these victims can‘t go into court. I don‘t know which victims will be able to go into court.

Then, really, you‘ll have an immunity regime for the perpetrators, for the violators and it will be impossible really to enforce the prohibitions that are in those executive orders and in our laws.

Bluster at the SEC and the proposed naval blockade against Iran (as supported by Mike Michaud) serve the same constituency.

John C. Dvorak has an irregular podcast with money manager Andrew Horowitz that is worth a listen. Here is a link to Monday's edition: Incredible Congressional Hearing and Other Observations on the Dvorak-Horowitz Stock Analysis Podcast.

If you listen from about ten to twenty minutes in, you'll hear Representative Gary Ackerman (D-NY) grill Securities and Exchange Commission officials about the Madoff scandal in a House hearing last week. The jist of the outburst is that SEC officials were told by whistleblowers that Madoff was rotten, but did nothing. As Dvorak says, it's pretty entertaining. Sad, too, of course. And it indicates just how screwed the American financial system is and just how much contempt both officials and financiers alike have for the public.

It's not that the SEC doesn't deserve strong criticism. But Ackerman may be just a bit too much of a performer and may not be as clean in the Madoff arena as he appears. See THIS in Harkavy's blog at the Village Voice, where a YouTube of the Ackerman performance is posted.

Harkavy, has quite an interesting angle on Ackerman's rage at the Madoff scandal: "Gary Ackerman's blast at SEC? Just theatrics from AIPAC loyalist who once took cash from Bernie Madoff." Also, Gary Ackerman's phony bluster: He and Congress pals deserve blame; his own district hard hit by Bernie Madoff.

Harkavy: Ackerman's own blistering attack on the sitting-duck SEC officials is easily explained: The congressman represents parts of Queens and Long Island, but he also represents conservative Jews across the country and in Israel as one of Jewish-hawk lobby AIPAC's most ardent loyalists. Madoff's scam deeply cut into that constituency of Ackerman's. Shouting "Shonda!" at the SEC should keep him in good stead with those folks.

Then, Harkavy discusses last spring's H. Res. 362, a non-binding resolution suggesting a blockade of Iran while preventing it from importing refined petroleum products. This still-unpassed measure continues to be supported by our own Mike Michaud.

The point is that both Ackerman's bluster at the SEC and the Iran blockade are part and parcel of the same politics.

as they go along. So the prospects for the Geithner "plan" (little more than a press release, "no briefing, no documents") have all the elements of a "fiasco." Here is the quick nugget from this extensive post by Yves Smith (naked capitalism):

Smith: Thus, the banks get funding on an open-ended basis, with no requirement to write down or sell the dreck. And even if some miraculously does get unloaded via this process, we wonder how far it will get to really cleaning up the banks. Ken Rogoff estimates US credit losses at $2.0 trillion; this plan appears likely to fall far short of that, which means we still have a lot of sick banks, just somewhat less so.

You read it here: Geithner should have been forced out the minute his tax problems surfaced. He's a bad actor, overriding the better instincts of Obama's political team to fold up the insolvent "too-big-to-fail-save" banks. The sooner we get rid of him the better.

Later, after we are still swimming in the same muck six or ten months up the road, let's hope some better wisdom is able to settle in at the White House before it's really too late.

Maine senator discussed axing 100% of state stabilization funds from stimulus bill in "centrists" cabal

That's being really in touch with what's going on out here, senator.

U.S. Economy: Jobless Claims Soar, Productivity Rises (Update1)
By Courtney Schlisserman and Timothy R. Homan

Feb. 5 (Bloomberg) -- The number of Americans filing first-time jobless claims reached a 26-year high and companies squeezed more productivity out of their remaining staff, underscoring the deepening deterioration in the labor market.

Initial applications for unemployment benefits climbed more than forecast to 626,000 last week, a Labor Department report showed today in Washington. Productivity, a measure of employee output per hour, rose at a 3.2 percent annual rate in October to December as employers cut 1.5 million from payrolls and slashed working hours by the most since 1975, the department said.

This calendar entry was covered extensively last year


The bloodthirsty amongst our fellow Americans hung their helmets on Secretary of State Colin Powell's phony graphics, February 5, 2003.

I concluded the five-year anniversary post last year, "Nothing described in Powell's presentation ever was found."

Added note: Vastleft again commemorates this sad and awful display of war propaganda (please see HERE and HERE) by showing how the filters at pbs a few months ago wouldn't let News Hour correspondent Gwen Ifill touch the notion that, "The media all-but-unanimously pronounced Colin Powell's fact-challenged Feb. 2003 UN presentation 'compelling.'"

Link update: The official State Department archive for the February 5, 2003 Powell presentation is HERE.

I know it's early, but given the Daschle mess and the desperate work going on to re-inflate the status quo by propping up insolvent banks--not to mention the war horrors escalating alongside Hillary Clinton's slash and burn diplomacy--I've almost seen enough to believe the next eight years will feel as bad or worse than the last eight.

Let me just say that 2001: A Space Odyssey is the greatest film ever made, and TCM is my favorite cable channel.

I never cared much for Tom Daschle. I felt that he was far too accommodating of the Bush agenda after he re-acquired the post of Senate Majority Leader in June 2001. Others may disagree. During his failed 2004 bid for re-election, he was accused of obstructing Bush's judicial nominations, and not being a sufficiently enthusiastic cheerleader for war.

But of course, he happily voted for the Iraq use of force resolution in October 2002, stating that "it is clear from this debate that Saddam's weapons of mass destruction are the principal threat to the United States and the only threat that would justify the use of the United States military force against Iraq."

Daschle has been an expert at making people believe he is a good liberal/progressive while at the same time furtively doing the bidding of corporate interests. His major clients over the years, both during his time as senator from South Dakota and after have included mining and logging concerns.

For example, in late 2001 he went to bat in Congress for Barrick Mining. For those familiar with the HBO television series "Deadwood," the amendment Daschle sneaked through nicely could become a late chapter of the saga. It granted legal immunity for Barrick's Homestake mine in the Black Hills, the very one once owned by William Randolph Hearst. The Lakota Sioux cannot pursue claims on billions of profits extracted from land once belonging to them.

The contradictions inherent in Daschle's character finally came to light in his failure to pay taxes on the extraordinary perks awarded him by InterMedia Partners, an insurance industry lobby. How the great benefits Daschle accepted from these guys would have affected the health care reform program apparently intended in the Obama Administration, we don't know. Suggestions (including in his own book) that Daschle would be a thorn in industry's side, an advocate of single payer, designer of a tough-on-industry health board deserved much skepticism. I'm happy that point is moot now, at least as far as Daschle is concerned.

Update: Before I wrote this, I had not read Greenwald's incredible post on Daschle, HERE. Greenwald is much more pointed than I was.

Greenwald: But there's no need to withhold judgment on Daschle himself. He embodies everything that is sleazy, sickly, and soul-less about Washington. It's probably impossible for Obama to fill his cabinet with individuals entirely free of Beltway filth -- it's extremely rare to get anywhere near that system without being infected by it -- but Daschle oozes Beltway slime from every pore.

And he has much to back this up, including the story of Daschle's behind-the-scenes work for telcoms during their successful bid in Congress for spying immunity.

I also fixed a misspelling in the original post and put in "included" for "been" for clarity.