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Ill and in Pain, Detainee Dies in US Hands, by Nina Bernstein, NY Times (August 13, 2008)

"He was 17 when he came to New York from Hong Kong in 1992 with his parents and younger sister, eyeing the skyline like any newcomer. Fifteen years later, Hiu Lui Ng was a New Yorker: a computer engineer with a job in the Empire State Building, a house in Queens, a wife who is a United States citizen and two American-born sons.

    But when Mr. Ng, who had overstayed a visa years earlier, went to immigration headquarters in Manhattan last summer for his final interview for a green card, he was swept into immigration detention and shuttled through jails and detention centers in three New England states.

    In April, Mr. Ng began complaining of excruciating back pain. By mid-July, he could no longer walk or stand. And last Wednesday, two days after his 34th birthday, he died in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in a Rhode Island hospital, his spine fractured and his body riddled with cancer that had gone undiagnosed and untreated for months.

    On Tuesday, with an autopsy by the Rhode Island medical examiner under way, his lawyers demanded a criminal investigation in a letter to federal and state prosecutors in Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont, and the Department of Homeland Security, which runs the detention system.

    Mr. Ng's death follows a succession of cases that have drawn Congressional scrutiny to complaints of inadequate medical care, human rights violations and a lack of oversight in immigration detention, a rapidly growing network of publicly and privately run jails where the government held more than 300,000 people in the last year while deciding whether to deport them.

    In federal court affidavits, Mr. Ng's lawyers contend that when he complained of severe pain that did not respond to analgesics, and grew too weak to walk or even stand to call his family from a detention pay phone, officials accused him of faking his condition. They denied him a wheelchair and refused pleas for an independent medical evaluation.

    Instead, the affidavits say, guards at the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility in Central Falls, R.I., dragged him from his bed on July 30, carried him in shackles to a car, bruising his arms and legs, and drove him two hours to a federal lockup in Hartford, where an immigration officer pressured him to withdraw all pending appeals of his case and accept deportation.

    "For this desperately sick, vulnerable person, this was torture," said Theodore N. Cox, one of Mr. Ng's lawyers, adding that they want to see a videotape of the transport made by guards.

    Immigration and detention officials would not discuss the case, saying the matter was under internal investigation. But in response to a relative of Mr. Ng's who had begged that he be checked for a spinal injury or fractures, the Wyatt detention center's director of nursing, Ben Candelaria, replied in a July 16 e-mail message that Mr. Ng was receiving appropriate care for "chronic back pain." He added, "We treat each and every detainee in our custody with the same high level of quality, professional care possible."

...."

A New Attack on Birth Control, Boston Globe Editorial (July 30, 2008)

" With just a few months left in office, President Bush is still doing the bidding of social conservatives who oppose women's reproductive freedoms. Under the guise of rules to protect antiabortion nurses and doctors from discrimination in hiring, a proposed new regulation would expand the definition of abortion to include any form of contraception that can work by stopping implantation of a fertilized egg in the uterus. This can include common birth-control pills, emergency contraception, and the intra-uterine device, or IUD. Doctors who refuse to perform abortions for reasons of personal conscience already are protected by law.

    The potential impact of this new rule on the more than 500,000 hospitals, family planning clinics, and medical offices that receive any form of federal funding could be dramatic. The rule could also undercut many state laws - including one in Massachusetts requiring hospitals to provide emergency contraception for rape victims - and laws requiring prescription drug insurance plans to include contraceptives. Massachusetts passed such a law in 2002.

    The draft proposed rule highlights the fact that many antiabortion groups also oppose one good method of preventing the unplanned pregnancies that lead to abortions - birth control. At some point in their lives, 98 percent of US women use birth control.

    The proposed rule, while claiming to protect the rights of nurses and doctors, would interfere with patients' rights. A woman seeking treatment could be denied birth control and not even be aware that the service was available - only denied to her because of the unexpressed personal beliefs of the practitioner.

    Last November, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists said gynecologists must provide "accurate and unbiased information" to patients and "have the duty to refer patients in a timely manner to other providers" if the doctors do not want to perform an abortion or prescribe birth control. The US secretary of health and human services, Michael Leavitt, said he thought this statement went too far in forcing doctors to choose between their beliefs and the prospect of professional sanctions.

    The administration does not need approval of Congress to put this rule into effect. But about 100 members of the House, including all representatives from this state except Stephen Lynch of South Boston, have signed a letter protesting it. In the Senate, Patty Murray of Washington and Hillary Clinton of New York are leading the opposition. The administration should take heed and drop its ideological attack on contraception. "

Jed Babbin: The Pentagon's Most Prolific Pundit, by Daniel Haack, Center for Media and Democracy (August 20, 2008)

"The morning of June 20, 2006, an email message [1] circulated amongst U.S. Defense Department [2] officials.

“Jed Babbin [3], one of our military analysts, is hosting the Michael Medved nationally syndicated radio show this afternoon. He would like to see if General [George W.] Casey [4] would be available for a phone interview,” the Pentagon staffer wrote. “This would be a softball interview and the show is 8th or 9th in the nation.”

Why would the Pentagon help set up a radio interview? And how did they know that the interview would be “softball”?

From early 2002 to April 2008, the Defense Department offered talking points, organized trips to places such as Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, and gave private briefings to a legion of retired military officers working as media pundits. The Pentagon’s military analyst program [5], a covert effort to promote a positive image of the Bush administration’s wartime performance, was a multi-level campaign involving quite a few colorful characters.

Flipping through the over 8,000 pages of documents released in connection with the program [6], one Pentagon pundit arguably steals the spotlight: Jed Babbin. A former Pentagon official himself, the retired Air Force officer served as a deputy undersecretary of defense with the George H.W. Bush [7] administration. Since then, he has kept busy authoring books, serving as a contributing editor to the conservative monthly American Spectator, frequently filling in for right-wing radio hosts such as Laura Ingraham and Hugh Hewitt [8], and appearing as a military pundit on cable television.

The Pentagon Producers

Babbin repeatedly appears in the Pentagon pundit documents, usually either emailing his American Spectator articles to Pentagon officials, or using his special access to arrange interviews with high-ranking government and military officers for his articles and radio guest host gigs.

“We can work it,” Bryan Whitman [9] wrote in a message to [10] fellow Pentagon public affairs staffer Eric Ruff [11] in July 2005. Whitman had just secured deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs Matthew Waxman for Babbin’s guest host slot on “The Mark Larson Show,” a conservative radio program out of California. “I hope you are getting a cut of Babbin’s action as his agent,” Whitman joked to Ruff.

In February 2006, Babbin emailed [12] Pentagon legal advisor Thomas Hemingway. “I’m subbing for Hugh Hewitt again tomorrow and want to bash the UN report,” he wrote, referring to an inquiry into conditions at Guantanamo Bay [13] that led the United Nations to call for the detention center to be closed [14]. “I asked for [U.S. Army Major General] Jay Hood and got the answer that the military isn’t going out on that now. Can you do it? Please call asap.”

Babbin didn’t just use Pentagon public affairs staffers as his radio bookers. He also asked them for their thoughts on what he should say, as a pundit.

“I just got a call from Jed Babbin,” wrote [15] one Pentagon public affairs officer in October 2006. “He is going to be on [the CNBC show] Kudlow [& Company] tonight and want [sic] to be prepared if they ask him about the [Al-Qaeda [16]] threat to Saudi oil fields. … Anything we could share with him??”

The Pentagon was also more than proactive. “[Fox News [17]‘] Hannity and Colmes is having Jed Babbin on today to talk about North Korea,” emailed [18] Pentagon public affairs staffer Dallas Lawrence to Ruff and Whitman in February 2005. “We are getting Jed a one pager on the status of forces in the Korean Peninsula (the message being, we still have a massive deterrent there for [North Korea]). We will also put him into touch with State for talking points on the 6 party talks.”

In a phone interview, Babbin defended his communications with the Pentagon. “I am a journalist,” he told me. “I have information that’s given to me by sources of all sorts. Private information is what you normally do in Washington. You get confidential sources and you rely on them. I’m not compromised. I can’t speak for anybody else other than myself, but I have no relationship with defense contractors, I have no contracts with the Pentagon. There’s no conflict there.”

But Babbin’s contacts with the Pentagon are still problematic, according to Kelly McBride, Ethics Group Leader at the Poynter Institute for media studies. “When you hire a former general [as a media commentator], you’re hiring him for his expertise and his ability to independently analyze what’s going on,” she explained. “If you’re assuming because he’s retired he has a measure of independence and then you find out, no, he’s actually been to all these trainings where he’s received talking points, that’s a problem. You have promised your audience that you’re going to deliver them independent analysis — not a mouthpiece for the Pentagon.”

That raises the question of whether the responsibility to ensure the integrity and independence of military analysts lies with the pundits themselves or with the media outlets that hired them. In this case, says McBride, it’s the latter.

...."

Journalists and Their Good Friends in the White House, by Glenn Greenwald, salon.com (August 20, 2008)

"The Washington Post's White House reporter, Michael Abramowitz, was asked yesterday during a chat [1] to name some of his "favorite people who work at the White House but who are not in the spotlight," and Abramowitz happily and easily offered a long list:

I like your question. One of the things you find in covering the White House is that many of the staff are extremely friendly and dedicated, and it's fun to get to know some of them. The truth is reporters tend to hang out with the people in the [White House] press office, so the names I might give you tend to be lower-level press aides, like Carlton Carroll, Stuart Siciliano and Pete Seat -- and spokeswoman Emily Lawrimore. They are extremely helpful to me (and I don't mean this list to be all-inclusive.)

I also enjoy talking with deputy chief of staff Joel Kaplan and deputy national security adviser Jim Jeffrey -- I wouldn't be surprised if Joel is one day a cabinet officer or a CEO somewhere. He has an interesting life story -- he joined the Marines after graduating from Harvard, then became a lawyer and is basically the top aide to Chief of Staff Josh Bolten.

Of course, Joel and others I mention are extremely discreet, so it's not like anyone is really dishing on the president! You need to look elsewhere for that.

That sounds like a really fun and playful circle of friends -- just a great, great group of people -- and Abramowitz seems to derive much satisfaction from being able to be a part of it. Only a curmudgeon -- or some shrill, angry Leftist type that just doesn't understand How Journalism Works -- would begrudge Abramowitz his fun.

But, in theory at least, White House press officials are the principal impediments to a White House reporter's being able to do his job. The core function of the White House press officials with whom Abramowitz loves to "hang out" and of whom he is obviously so fond is to manipulate his reporting in favor of the White House, to conceal or distort facts that are incriminating of the President, to disseminate narratives that promote the Government's goals. That's true in general, and particularly so for the most secretive and manipulative White House in modern American history. For that reason, healthy "watchdog" journalism would dictate that such officials are viewed with suspicion, that the relationship would be far more adversarial than affectionate, that reporters would speak of such officials dispassionately rather than gushing with the kind of personal praise one generally reserves for one's dearest friends and closest colleagues.

That's not to say that reporters need to despise every government official with whom they interact. There's nothing wrong per se with civil interaction, even with those over whom one is supposed to be exerting adversarial scrutiny. Good relationships with government sources can assist a reporter in obtaining otherwise unavailable information that the Government wants to conceal. But Abramowitz, after hailing these White House press officials as good friends, then goes out of his way to emphasize, admiringly, how "extremely discreet" they are, how they don't actually give him any information about the President that they're not authorized or directed to give him. They're simply propaganda agents -- loyal and faithful ones -- and Abramowitz loves them for that and loves to "hang out" with them.

The reason why this mentality matters is reflected in a question that was asked thereafter of Abramowitz, presumably by a reader here who, in essence, copied verbatim a paragraph I wrote on Monday [2] about The Washington Post's mindless, ongoing, government-subservient reporting in the anthrax case:

New York: When reading The Post's coverage of the Bruce Ivins anthrax investigation, it occurs to me that The Post's role has been and continues to be what the establishment media's role generally is -- to serve government sources and amplify their claims, not to investigate their veracity. That's how it was when Saddam Hussein who was the original anthrax culprit, followed by Steven Hatfill, and now Bruce Ivins. It's how Jessica Lynch heroically fought off Iraqi goons in a firefight, how Pat Tillman stood down al-Qaeda monsters until they murdered him, how Iraq possessed mountains of WMD, and now, how Russia has assaulted the consensus values of the Western World by invading a sovereign country and occupying parts of it for a whole week, etc., etc.

All of those narratives came from the government directly into the pages of The Washington Post, which then uncritically conveyed them, often (as in the case of the Jessica Lynch lies and WMD claims) playing a leading role in doing so. Thoughts?

Michael Abramowitz: I don't agree with your basic premise. The media clearly fell down in some of the areas you mention, but sometimes it takes time to get a complete, accurate picture of what happened in murky situations. To take just two of the cases you mention -- Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman: The media continued digging into these cases until the truth came out. It's not always possible to do that in the first day or two of a big story.

Of course Abramowitz doesn't "agree with the basic premise." Establishment journalists think that their profession works just great. There's no profession less capable of self-reflection than the establishment media. Even after the last seven years, they actually still perceive themselves as tenacious diggers for the Truth -- Newsweek's Richard Wolffe [3]: "the press here does a fantastic job of adhering to journalistic standards and covering politics in general" -- and false, government-subservient reporting is, to them, merely the rare aberration, confined to the small handful of Judy Millers among them. That (as Abramowitz's answer illustrates) is how large numbers of them actually think.

But just look at the list of profound journalistic failings which Abramowitz breezily dismisses as both insignificant and understandable. It's certainly true that reporters can't be expected to report on complex stories with complete accuracy on the first day. The cliché that reporters publish "first drafts of history" is true enough, and some inaccuracies are to be expected.

But these are all episodes where the establishment media didn't merely report some inaccuracies. They are instances where they aggressively and vocally spread pure, fundamental falsehoods. And not just falsehoods -- but extremely damaging falsehoods that were concocted by the Government and then passed along to the "watchdog press," which then published the Government falsehoods in full, and did so uncritically, without any meaningful investigation, examination, or skepticism -- not just for days, but for weeks, months and, in many instances, for years.

And one major reason (among several) why they did so -- why they still do so -- is because of the very mentality of which Abramowitz is so proud: they see the government officials whom they cover as their friends, colleagues, the people on whom they depend for their access, whose company they cherish and whose character they admire. Is it really any surprise that journalists who -- as Abramowitz puts it -- "tend to hang out" with their friends in the White House press office uncritically pass on what they're told as though it's Truth?

Recall the drippy, sycophantic paean [4] which Politico's Mike Allen wrote to Bush Communications Director Dan Bartlett's Greatness once Bartlett announced he was leaving the White House (headline: "Bush's 'truth-teller' leaving president's side"). Bush's truth-teller recently parlayed [5] his friendships with the press into a position as "political analyst" with CBS News. The wall between the Government and the establishment media barely even exists in theory any longer. Bartlett's move from Communications Director in Bush's White House to "political analyst" for CBS News is more of a lateral, in-house transfer than it is anything else.

It's actually difficult to find a news story of any significance that isn't shaped at its core by the incestuous, deeply affectionate relationship between the Government and the establishment media. Here's what Mikhail Gorbachev, ironically enough, complained about first and foremost in his New York Times Op-Ed this morning [6] on how the Russia/Georgia conflict is being discussed in the U.S.:

The planners of this campaign clearly wanted to make sure that, whatever the outcome, Russia would be blamed for worsening the situation. The West then mounted a propaganda attack against Russia, with the American news media leading the way.

The news coverage has been far from fair and balanced, especially during the first days of the crisis. Tskhinvali was in smoking ruins and thousands of people were fleeing - before any Russian troops arrived. Yet Russia was already being accused of aggression; news reports were often an embarrassing recitation of the Georgian leader's deceptive statements.

A septuagenarian Russian recognizes joint government-media propaganda campaigns when he sees it, and the media's dissemination and amplification of Government narratives that they are fed by their good friends in Government ("I also enjoy talking with deputy chief of staff Joel Kaplan and deputy national security adviser Jim Jeffrey") is the core, defining (though not exclusive) function of the establishment media.

* * * * *

There are many revealing episodes during the Bush presidency illustrating how the media functions, but there is none more revealing than the disclosures from the Lewis Libby criminal trial. Documents prepared by former Cheney Communications Director Catherine Martin (wife of FCC Chairman Kevin Martin) boasted that [7] Tim Russert's Meet the Press was the best venue for Cheney to answer questions because he was able to "control message." Martin also testified at trial that she "suggested we put the vice president on 'Meet the Press,' which was a tactic we often used. It's our best format" (Dana Milbank: "Memo to Tim Russert: Dick Cheney thinks he controls you"). Russert himself subsequently testified [7] that "when any senior government official calls him, they are presumptively off the record" (Dan Froomkin: "That's not reporting, that's enabling. That's how you treat your friends when you're having an innocent chat, not the people you're supposed to be holding accountable").

Just think about what that meant: the single greatest source of government disinformation and corruption in America -- Dick Cheney's office -- viewed Tim Russert as the most pliable and effective instrument for disseminating their propaganda to the country. That's not media critics or rabble-bloggers saying that. That was the view of Russert which Dick Cheney's office had -- and understandably so.

And yet -- or, more accurately, "therefore" -- it's the very same pliant instrument of government disinformation -- Tim Russert -- who was viewed more or less unanimously by the media class as being the embodiment of everything that a Good Journalist should be. The very same person who -- by Dick Cheney's own assessment -- served most eagerly as a propaganda tool for the political class was simultaneously viewed by his colleagues as the Consummate Journalist. If you wanted to prove how subservient our establishment media is to the Government, would it be possible to invent better evidence than that? As Lewis Lapham recently put it [8] in his Harper's piece entitled "Elegy for a Rubber Stamp" [9] (sub. rq'd):

[Russert's] on-air persona was that of an attentive and accommodating headwaiter, as helpless as Charlie Rose in his infatuation with A-list celebrity.

That is who was canonized -- by the media and, revealingly, by the Right -- as the Model of Great Journalism. That's because the core function of the establishment press is to obtain and then disseminate government claims. Those journalists (such as Russert) who can do that best and most effectively -- typically due to their close and amicable relationships with Government officials ("it's fun to get to know some of them. The truth is reporters tend to hang out with the people in the [White House] press office") -- become the most celebrated media stars. As David Halberstam said [10] in 2006: "By and large, the more famous you are, the less of a journalist you are." One could add to that observation that the more gushing affection and admiration you harbor for your "extremely discreet" Government-official/friends, the less of a journalist you are. "

Swift Boat Economics, by Dean Baker, truthout.org (August 18, 2008)

" In the last election, the Republicans invented their brilliant Swift boat strategy to get George W. Bush back in the White House. Challenged by a decorated Vietnam War veteran, President Bush, who couldn't be bothered in serve in a war that he supported, took the offensive. He enlisted a group of right-wingers to invent stories impugning Kerry's integrity and service record.

    The media completely failed in their responsibility to the public and treated the lies invented by the Swift boaters with respect. The country was then treated to a he said, she said, in which Kerry had to defend himself against lies fabricated from whole cloth.

    Senator McCain now faces a similar situation in this election. He is stuck running on the record of a president who is presiding over an economy that is sinking into recession and is facing the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. By contrast, Senator Obama can claim the legacy of the strong economy of the Clinton years.

    Tarred with the most dismal record of job creation and income growth of any president since the Great Depression, it would be reasonable to expect that Senator McCain would be defensive on the economy; but not in Swift boat America.

    Instead Senator McCain is filling the airwaves with commercials telling the public that Obama's tax increases will slow growth and cost the economy jobs. It's pretty scary stuff to anyone who takes it seriously.

    Of course, there's no truth to Senator McCain's Swift boat economics. During the eight years of the Clinton administration, when rich people paid the same tax rates proposed by Senator Obama, the private sector added 15.8 million jobs. By contrast, in the seven years and six months of the Bush administration, when rich people paid the Bush-McCain tax rates, the private sector has added just 3.5 million jobs. And, it is losing jobs at the rate of almost 100,000 a month as President Bush prepares for retirement.

 While job growth is probably the most important measure of the economy's health, almost every other measure also showed that the economy performed better with the Clinton-Obama tax rate than the Bush-McCain tax rate. The real wage for the typical worker rose by 6.6 percent in the Clinton years. By contrast, wages have risen by just 1.0 percent in the Bush years and are now falling. At the current rate of decline, real wages will be lower In January of 2009 than when President Bush took office in 2001. The typical family's income rose by 15.3 percent under Clinton, it fell by 1.6 percent under Bush.

    In short, it is easy to show McCain's ad is utter nonsense. The economy had its most prosperous period in 30 years with the tax rates Obama is proposing. President Bush then cut taxes for the rich, and the economy turned in its worst performance since the Great Depression. While the tax rates are hardly the whole story behind the prosperity of the Clinton years or the economic deterioration of the Bush years, the record makes a mockery of the scare story in the McCain ad.

    So why would Senator McCain make an ad that is so obviously false? In Swift boat country, there is no place for truth. McCain knows he can say anything he wants, regardless of how untrue it is, and his claim will be treated seriously by the media.

    Reporters will now treat it as a debatable point whether the tax rates proposed by Obama will stifle growth and cost jobs. They will act as though Senator McCain has raised a serious point - perhaps Obama's tax plan really will hurt the economy. Reporters would actually have to know something about the economy, or at least arithmetic, to know that McCain's claims are utter nonsense.

    The public will have to teach the media. This is not a he said, she said. The economy has performed very well taxing rich people at the rates proposed by Senator Obama. Any reporter who suggests it is plausible to claim these tax rates will stifle growth and job creation is simply too ill-informed to be covering economic issues. Reporters should be telling the public Senator McCain's ads are contradicted by the facts, not pretending that they raise plausible concerns about the economy. "

Why McCain May Well Win, by Robert Parry, consortiumnews.com (August 7, 2008)

"It might seem unlikely that the United States would elect John McCain to succeed George W. Bush when that would ensure continuation of many unpopular Bush policies: an ill-defined war with the Muslim world, right-wing consolidation of the U.S. Supreme Court, a drill-oriented energy strategy, tax cuts creating massive federal deficits, etc., etc.

But there are reasons - beyond understandable concerns about Barack Obama's limited experience - that make a McCain victory possible, indeed maybe probable.

Here is one of the big ones: The U.S. news media is as bad as ever, arguably worse.

On Monday, Obama gave a detail-rich speech on how he would address the energy crisis, which is a major point of concern among Americans. From ideas for energy innovation to retrofitting the U.S. auto industry to conservation steps to limited new offshore drilling, Obama did what he is often accused of not doing, fleshing out his soaring rhetoric.

McCain responded with a harsh critique of Obama's calls for more conservation, claiming that Obama wants to solve the energy crisis by having people inflate their tires. McCain's campaign even passed out a tire gauge marked as Obama's energy plan.

For his part, McCain made clear he wanted to drill for more oil wherever it could be found and to build many more nuclear power plants.

These competing plans offered a chance for the evening news to address an issue of substance that is high on the voters' agenda. Instead, NBC News anchor Brian Williams devoted 30 seconds to the dueling energy speeches, without any details and with the witty opening line that Obama was "refining" his energy plan.

So, instead of dealing with a serious issue in a serious way, NBC News ignored the substance and went for a clever slight against Obama, hitting his political maneuvering in his softened opposition to more offshore drilling.

Williams's quip fit with one of the press corps' favorite campaign narratives, Obama's flip-flopping. But the coverage ignored far more important elements of the story, such as the feasibility of Obama's vow that "we must end the age of oil in our time [1]" or the wisdom of McCain's emphasis on drilling - and nuking - the nation out of its energy mess.

And, as for flip-flops, McCain's dramatic repositioning of himself as an anti-environmentalist - after years of being one of the green movement's favorite Republicans - represents a far more significant change than Obama's modest waffling on offshore oil.

The Sierra Club, one of the nation's premier environmental organizations, has repudiated McCain and now is running ads attacking his energy plan. But McCain's flip-flops - even complete reversals - remain an underplayed part of the campaign story. They just don't fit the narrative of maverick John McCain on the "Straight Talk Express."

Loving the 'Surge'

The major U.S. news media has been equally superficial in dealing with the Iraq War and the "war on terror." It is now a fully enshrined conventional wisdom that George W. Bush's troop "surge" was a huge success and vindicates McCain's early support for it.

On Obama's overseas trip, it became de rigueur for each interviewer to pound him for the first 10 or 15 minutes with demands that he accept the accepted wisdom about the "surge" and admit that he was wrong and McCain was right.

Obama's attempts to offer a more subtle explanation of what had occurred in Iraq - that key reasons for the declining violence actually predated the "surge" - were treated with bafflement by the interviewers, who simply reframed their questions and came back at him in a show of toughness against Obama's supposed evasions.

CBS News anchor Katie Couric started this pattern, but others fell smartly in line, including NBC's Tom Brokaw on "Meet the Press." [2] Indeed, many of the same media stars who had cheered the nation to war in 2003 (such as Brokaw) were now hectoring Obama, who had spoken out against the invasion in real time.

Conversely, McCain is never challenged about his misjudgment [3] in advocating a rapid pivot from Afghanistan to Iraq in late 2001 and early 2002, before Osama bin Laden and other top al-Qaeda were captured and before Afghanistan had stabilized.

That premature pivot now stands as one of the biggest military blunders in U.S. history, leaving American troops bogged down in two open-ended wars and allowing the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks to regroup and to plot in safe havens inside Pakistan.

However, American voters who rely on the major news media for their information would have no idea about McCain's central role in this fiasco. All they hear about is how McCain was right about the "surge" and how Obama won't admit he was wrong.

Britney/Paris

When American news consumers aren't hearing misinformation, they're almost surely hearing trivia. The TV news shows couldn't resist endlessly repeating McCain's attack ad that compared Obama and his enthusiastic reception in Berlin to misbehaving celebrities Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

Though the juxtaposition was clearly meant to demean - and reminded some political observers of the "call me" ads of a sexy white woman whispering to black Tennessee Senate candidate Harold Ford - McCain's campaign insisted it was all in good fun.

While some pundits did take note of McCain's detour onto the low road, others picked up McCain's campaign theme that Obama is a "presumptuous" elitist who looks down on others.

That powerful attack line, which touches on the grievances of working-class whites who feel that some blacks have gotten unfair advantages from affirmative action, is at the heart of modern American racism. Since the Nixon era, Republicans have played this Southern Strategy with great success, telling whites that they're the real victims.

This Obama-elitist theme reached its apex (or nadir, if you prefer) when the Washington Post's Dana Milbank distorted a reported quote from Obama to a closed Democratic caucus and used it to prove Obama was a "presumptuous nominee." [Washington Post, July 30, 2008 [4]]

Jonathan Capehart, Milbank's colleague from the Washington Post's neoconservative editorial page, then took the point a step further on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" show, citing Milbank's misleading quote to establish that Obama is an "uppity" black man.

Yet, the true meaning of the Obama quote appears to have been almost the opposite of how Milbank used it.

Painting Obama as a megalomaniac, Milbank wrote: "Inside [the caucus], according to a witness, [Obama] told the House members, 'This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for,' adding: 'I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.'"

However, other people who attended the caucus complained that Milbank had yanked the words out of context to support his "presumptuous" thesis, not to reflect what Obama actually said.

Rep. Jim Clyburn, D-South Carolina, said Obama's comment was "in response to what one of the [House] members prefaced the question by," a reference to the crowd of 200,000 that turned out to hear Obama speak in Berlin.

According to Clyburn, Obama "said, 'I wish I could take credit for that, but I can't. Because it's not about me. It's about America. It's about the people of Germany and the people of Europe looking for a new hope, new relationships, as we go forward in the world.' So, he expressly said that it's not about me."

A House Democratic aide sent an e-mail to Fox News [5] saying, "Lots of people are reading the quote about Obama being a symbol and getting it wrong. His entire point of that riff was that the campaign IS NOT about him.

"The Post left out the important first half of the sentence, which was something along the lines of: 'It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It's about America. I have just become a symbol ...'"

So, it appears that Obama's attempt to show humility was transformed into its opposite, establishing that, as Capehart put it, Obama is an "uppity" black man. [Capehart himself is black.]

A week after Milbank pulled the Obama quote inside out, the Washington Post had yet to run a correction or a clarification. The august Post apparently judges that Obama's supporters don't have the clout to punish a news organization for getting a quote wrong, even if it continues to reverberate through the media echo chamber to millions of Americans.

Putting Obama at Risk

Yet possibly even more offensive than the quote, Milbank's column shoved everything, including the Secret Service security arrangements for Obama, through the lens of proving that the candidate is arrogant.

When Washington police and the Secret Service blocked off roads for Obama's motorcade, that was not simply prudence in the face of extraordinary security concerns for Obama's life; it was proof that Obama already sees himself as a head of state.

"He traveled in a bubble more insulating than the actual President's. Traffic was shut down for him as he zoomed about town in a long, presidential-style motorcade, while the public and most of the press were kept in the dark about his activities."

Milbank groused, too, about the tight security that the police put around Obama's movements on Capitol Hill.

"Capitol Police cleared the halls -- just as they do for the actual President. The Secret Service hustled him in through a side door -- just as they do for the actual President," Milbank wrote.

While Milbank portrayed these security steps as further evidence of Obama's hubris, there is no reason to believe that Obama had any say in the decisions of his security detail to protect the candidate.

Milbank and the Post were behaving as if they were oblivious to the physical danger that surrounds the first African-American to have a serious chance to be elected President of the United States. It was almost as if they were baiting him to order the Secret Service to pull back or face the accusation that he is, as Capehart put it, "uppity."

This pattern of how the major media treats Obama also is not new. Although the McCain campaign and the right-wing media insist that Obama gets easy treatment from the press corps, that amounts to more "working the refs" than a legitimate complaint.

Just because Obama gets more coverage than McCain - the centerpiece of the Republican complaint - doesn't mean that the press favors Obama, anymore than the fact that Bill Clinton got lots of coverage in 1998 over the Monica Lewinsky scandal meant that the press was favoring him.

Indeed, there have been repeated examples of media double standards working against Obama.

For instance, during the primaries, the major media obsessed for weeks over controversies that would have blown over for other candidates in days. The stupid remarks by Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright, were endless fodder for news programs, while offensive comments from pro-McCain pastors were just tiny blips and soon disappeared.

Similarly, Obama's lack of a flag-lapel pin became a theme that was used to challenge his patriotism, although neither John McCain nor Hillary Clinton wore a pin. Neither, by the way, did ABC's George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson as they moderated the April 16 debate in Philadelphia [6] where Obama was grilled over his lack of a flag-lapel pin.

(The flag-lapel "issue" was first given national prominence by New York Times columnist William Kristol and was given more impetus by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer. To put the issue to rest, Obama finally began wearing a flag pin, though McCain still doesn't wear one regularly.)

Economic Determinism

Every presidential election year, it seems, some economist publishes an article that declares that economic data - good or bad - will decide whether the White House will be won by the in-power party or the out-of-power party. For instance, the booming economy of 2000 supposedly assured Al Gore a resounding victory.

In Campaign 2008, this thinking holds that Americans - faced with severe economic troubles - will throw the Republicans out of the White House and elect a Democrat.

However, this economic determinism may no longer hold sway in a nation that is as inundated with media as the United States is. The ability to float false "themes" against one candidate or another and have the major media constantly repeat the propaganda is an extraordinarily powerful force in deciding American elections.

As we describe in our book Neck Deep [7], millions of Americans went to the polls in November 2000 believing a number of false claims that had been circulated about Vice President Gore (including the bogus notion that he had been part of a plan to sell nuclear secrets to China, when those secrets actually had been compromised during the Reagan years.)

Given the persistent superficiality - and cowardice - of the major U.S. news media, there's even the larger question of whether a meaningful democracy can survive when the public is so thoroughly misinformed.

Although there are some Internet sites that challenge the major media's errors, the imbalance remains tilted heavily toward the ideological Right. Especially when prestige newspapers like the Washington Post contribute to the distribution of false or misleading information - as with Milbank's quote about Obama - the pro-Republican media eagerly amplifies it and most Americans never hear the other side.

Right-wing Internet sites also have proven to be very adept at inserting completely false claims about Obama that stick with many Americans, such as the oft-repeated lie that Obama is a Muslim or that he trained at a radical Islamic madrassah.

To assume that people will somehow see through such distortions has proven to be naíve in the past. More likely, many millions of Americans will head to the polls in November having internalized a hodgepodge of negative themes about Obama. Indeed, a significant number who have absorbed the uglier accusations will have come to hate him.

So, even if a McCain victory guarantees that the United States would solidify the policies of a deeply disliked President, many Americans may set aside what may be good for the country - or even good for their own pocketbooks - and vote against Obama, more based on perceptions than reality."

The PATRIOT Act's War on Charity, by Maya Schenwar, truthout.org (August 5, 2008)

"Since the PATRIOT Act's passage almost seven years ago, many of its adverse effects on activist organizations and peace groups have become plain. The law grants the government broad new surveillance privileges and access to private property, and protests and demonstrations have been heavily monitored and contained in the wake of 9/11. But according to a new report, the worst effects on nonprofit organizations have garnered little attention. New powers granted to the Treasury Department currently allow the government to shut down charities based on unfounded claims; to bar nonprofits from operating in some international disaster zones, and to freeze the assets of "designated" charities, leaving large sums of money intended for humanitarian causes to fester indefinitely in Treasury vaults.

    Post-9/11 regulations forbid any organization to provide or attempt to provide "material support or resources" to groups or individuals designated as "terrorist." It's also prohibited to "otherwise associate" with groups labeled "terrorist." No charges need to be filed for the government to take action: If the Treasury Department has a "reasonable suspicion" that an organization is violating these rules, it can seize its assets and shut down the group.

    "U.S. nonprofits operate within a legal regime that harms charitable programs, undermines the independence of the nonprofit sector, and weakens civil society," states the recent report, co-authored by the watchdog organization OMB Watch and the philanthropic network Grantmakers Without Borders (GWB).

    Seven US nonprofits have been completely shut down for "supporting terrorism."

    According to Kay Guinane, OMB Watch's director of nonprofit speech rights and one of the report's co-authors, the government has a free hand to act based purely on suspicion when it comes to the nonprofit sector. Executive Order 13224, which outlaws contact with "terrorist organizations," is vague about the criteria for how the "terrorist" label - or the "terrorist supporter" label - is to be designated or investigated.

    In fact, Guinane told Truthout, "The PATRIOT Act itself allows organizations to be shut down 'pending an investigation.'" One such organization, Kind Hearts for Charitable Human Development, has not even been designated as a supporter of terrorism, though it was shut down a year and a half ago.

    All of the organizations shut down by the government have been Muslim-affiliated charities, according to Guinane.

    The PATRIOT Act and its cousins deal a particularly hard blow to US charities that operate internationally. The OMB Watch/GWB report notes that after the 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, groups attempting to distribute food and water in areas controlled by the Tamil Tigers risked violating the executive order, which forbids providing "material support" to members of terrorist organizations.

    For the nonprofit Humanitarian Law Project (HLP), counterterrorism laws hit at the core of some of its goals, such as introducing conflict resolution techniques and human rights practices to groups like the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK), a designated organization. HLP has fought the PATRIOT Act since its inception. According to attorney David Cole, who has argued for HLP's rights to operate in "terrorist"-controlled areas, counterterrorism legislation often criminalizes purely humanitarian aid.

    "This law is so sweeping that it makes it a crime for our clients to provide medical services to tsunami survivors in Sri Lanka and to provide assistance in human rights advocacy to the Kurds in Turkey,” Cole said during a 2005 hearing.

    Moreover, according to the OMB Watch/GWB report, for some groups, counterterrorism laws make it tough to adhere to their ethical and moral codes. The principles of the International Red Cross state, "The humanitarian imperative comes first. Aid is given regardless of the race, creed or nationality of the recipients and without adverse distinction of any kind. Aid priorities are calculated on the basis of need alone." However, if an organization must avoid the possibility of granting humanitarian aid to anyone affiliated with a terrorist group, priorities can take a very different shape.

...."

Anti-Regulation Aide to Cheney Is Up for Energy Post, by Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post (August 19, 2008)

"A senior aide to Vice President Cheney is the leading contender to become a top official at the Energy Department, according to several current and former administration officials, a promotion that would put one of the administration's most ardent opponents of environmental regulation in charge of forming department policies on climate change.

    F. Chase Hutto III has played a prominent behind-the-scenes role in shaping the administration's environmental policies for several years, the officials said, helping to rewrite rules affecting the air that Americans breathe and the waters that oil tankers traverse. In every instance, according to both his allies and opponents, he has challenged proposals that would place additional regulations on industry.

    The move to elevate the domestic policy adviser to the post of assistant secretary for policy and international affairs signals the administration's determination to resist new environmental protections, environmentalists said.

    The assistant secretary is the "primary advisor to the Secretary and the Department on energy and technology policy development," conducts overseas negotiations on energy issues such as climate change, performs environmental analyses, and "leads the Department's international energy initiatives," according to the agency's Web site.

    Hutto did not respond to several requests for an interview. Cheney spokeswoman Lea Anne McBride would not comment on the matter, saying the office does not discuss pending nominations, but she confirmed that Hutto has helped shape administration policies on an array of issues, including proposed protections for endangered right whales and whether to regulate carbon dioxide emissions under the Clean Air Act.

...."

Lawsuit Seeks EPA Pesticide Data, by Jane Kay, San Francisco Chronicle (August 19, 2008)

"WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is refusing to disclose records about a new class of pesticides that could be playing a role in the disappearance of millions of honeybees in the United States, a lawsuit filed Monday charges. [1]

The Natural Resources Defense Council wants to see the studies that the EPA required when it approved a pesticide made by Bayer CropScience five years ago.

The environmental group filed the suit as part of an effort to find out how diligently the EPA is protecting honeybees from dangerous pesticides, said Aaron Colangelo, a lawyer for the group in Washington.

In the last two years, beekeepers have reported unexplained losses of hives - 30 percent and upward - leading to a phenomenon called colony collapse disorder. Scientists believe that the decline in bees is linked to an onslaught of pesticides, mites, parasites and viruses, as well as a loss of habitat and food.

$15 billion in crops

Bees pollinate about one-third of the human diet, $15 billion worth of U.S. crops, including almonds in California, blueberries in Maine, cucumbers in North Carolina and 85 other commercial crops, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Not finding a cause of the collapse could prove costly, scientists warn.

Representatives of the EPA said they hadn't seen the suit and couldn't comment.

Clothianidin is the pesticide at the center of controversy. It is used to coat corn, sugar beet and sorghum seeds and is part of a class of pesticides called neonicotinoids. The pesticide was blamed for bee deaths in France and Germany, which also is dealing with a colony collapse. Those two countries have suspended its use until further study. An EPA fact sheet from 2003 says clothianidin has the potential for toxic chronic exposure to honey bees, as well as other pollinators, through residues in nectar and pollen.

The EPA granted conditional registration for clothianidin in 2003 and at the same time required that Bayer CropScience submit studies on chronic exposure to honeybees, including a complete worker bee lifecycle study as well as an evaluation of exposure and effects to the queen, the group said. The queen, necessary for a colony, lives a few years; the workers live only six weeks, but there is no honey without them.

"The public has no idea whether those studies have been submitted to the EPA or not and, if so, what they show. Maybe they never came in. Maybe they came in, and they show a real problem for bees. Maybe they're poorly conducted studies that don't satisfy EPA's requirement," Colangelo said.
Request for records
On July 17, after getting no response from the EPA about securing the studies, the environmental group filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act, which requires the records within 20 business days absent unusual circumstances.

When the federal agency missed the August deadline, the group filed the lawsuit, asking the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., to force the EPA to turn over the records.

...."

Endangered Species Law in Danger From Bush, San Francisco Chronicle Editorial (August 18, 2008)

"The countdown to January has begun, and the Bush administration is starting to roll out a long, foul list of last-minute policy changes. If its proposal to gut the Endangered Species Act is any indication of what it has in mind, we all have cause to be frightened of the next several months.

The proposal, which does not require congressional approval, would allow federal agencies to decide for themselves whether or not that highway, dam or mine they want to build would adversely impact any endangered species - instead of turning the matter over to independent government scientists in the Fish & Wildlife Service, the way that they've done for 35 years.

And if you don't think that the Department of Transportation or the Office of Surface Mining or any other federal department is more interested in getting its own projects done than in the fate of a rare fish or snake or bird, well, how much would you like to pay for that bridge that is going to destroy them?

What adds the insult to this injury is the rationale this administration has offered for these changes. Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne expressed the administration's concern that the Endangered Species Act in its current form might be acting as a "back door" for federal agencies to assess the impact of greenhouse-gas emissions on protected species and their habitats. He added that the agency needed to "focus" on where it could "do the most good."

Excuse us?

Federal agencies with the foresight to consider how greenhouse-gas emissions are affecting endangered species should be applauded and encouraged, not censored and shut down. Especially since so few of them have either the expertise or the inclination to consider the impact their projects have on endangered species - which is why those independent government science reviews came in handy.

According to Michael Bean, the director of wildlife conservation activities for the Environmental Defense Fund, tens of thousands of federal projects get scrutiny from the Fish & Wildlife Service every year. It's inconceivable that we'd receive the same level of oversight if we just left the job up to each agency. And that, of course, is the point - for years, the Bush administration has sought ways to undermine the review process for habitat and protected species. In its own way, this move is breathtakingly brilliant: It allows the Bush administration to gut a law without having to answer for it to Congress, or, it turns out, to the public.

Of course, the Bush administration got some help: It has since emerged that this regulation was written in the Department of the Interior's Solicitor's Office. That makes sense - the administration was more interested in the opinions of lawyers than those of scientists about the real-world impact that this proposal will have. Their lawyers had better have a good explanation as to why there will be no public hearings on this issue and why the Fish & Wildlife Service is no longer accepting e-mail from the public during this 30-day "public comment" period.

Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., and the chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works committee, called the proposed changes illegal. If the Bush administration manages to ram this through, we urge her to make sure that reversing it is one of her top priorities as soon as a new administration takes office.

Unfortunately, we fear that Boxer - and the rest of Congress - will have a lot to clean up once January comes around. If this proposal is any indication of what the Bush administration has in mind for its last-minute list, the next several months are going to bring a lot of pain for the environment, for animals, and for humans, too.

The Fish and Wildlife Service claims that you can still make your voice heard by going to the Federal Rulemaking Portal at www.regulations.gov."

Top CEOs Give Ten Times More to McCain Than to Obama, by Michael O'Brien, The Hill (August 15, 2008)

" The top executives of America's biggest companies are more willing to open their wallets for John McCain than his Democratic rival, donating 10 times as much to the Arizona senator's campaign as to Barack Obama's.

    Obama's campaign seized on the findings of The Hill's review of campaign finance records to suggest that the gap was due to "special favors" McCain has given corporations.

    The presumptive GOP nominee has received $208,200 from the chief executive officers of the 100 biggest Fortune 500 corporations, according to a review of campaign finance reports. Obama has taken in $20,400 from the same group of people.

    "It is not surprising that a Washington celebrity like John McCain would be able to collect contributions based on 26 years of special favors provided to individual businesses," said Jason Furman, Obama's economic policy director.

...."

The Great Corporate Tax Heist, by Robert L. Borosage, Huffington Post (August 14, 2008)

"Remember the old Steve Martin routine on how to make a million dollars and not pay taxes: "First, make a million dollars. ... Second, don't pay taxes." Turns out Martin's joke is standard operating procedure for corporations in the United States -- only, in comparison, Martin was a piker.

Wednesday, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released a study on taxes paid by corporations. In what Sen. Byron L. Dorgan, D-N.D., mildly called "a shocking indictment of the current tax system," the GAO found that about two-thirds of corporations operating in the United States did not pay taxes annually from 1998 to 2005.

Now, most corporations in America are start-ups or small, mom-and-pop operations that have adopted a corporate form to lower their tax rates. And a greater percentage of large corporations do pay some taxes. But in 2005, with corporate profits reaching new heights as a percentage of national income, the GAO found that more than one-fourth -- 28 percent of large corporations -- paid no taxes. (It defined large corporations as those with assets of at least $250 million or gross receipts of at least $50 million.) They can tell you how to make $50 million and not pay taxes.

Not surprisingly, the income collected from corporations has been declining as a percentage of GDP, with the burden transferred to your income and payroll taxes. According to a study by the Treasury Department, from 2000 to 2006, an average of 2.2 percent of GDP was collected in corporate taxes. This compares to an average of 3.4 percent in other industrial countries. The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office projects that, under current law, corporate revenues will decline to 1.9 percent of GDP by 2017.

Why is this important? Well, the Bush administration, led by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, and conservatives, led by John McCain, are mounting a major campaign to cut the corporate tax rate even more, arguing that we are crippled competitively by having a U.S. rate higher than any industrial nation other than Japan. "America has the second-highest business (tax) rate in the entire world," says John McCain. "Is it any wonder that jobs are moving overseas? We're taxing them out of the country." But the GAO study confirms what we already knew: Whatever the nominal tax rate, U.S. corporations pay an effective rate among the lowest in the industrial world.

Yet the core of the McCain economic agenda consists of breathtaking corporate tax breaks. He calls for cutting the top corporate rate from 35 percent to 25 percent and allowing corporations to write off investments in the first year. Combined, the Tax Policy Center wonks cost these at more than $1.3 trillion over 10 years. Len Burman of the Tax Policy Center estimates that in total, McCain would cut corporate revenues by about 50 percent from current levels. They'll be making hundreds of millions of dollars and not paying taxes. This is no joke.

To pay for these tax breaks, sustain the Bush tax cuts, add more tax breaks and balance the budget in four years, as McCain promises, will require heroic cuts in spending. Not military spending; McCain promises to increase that. How will he do this? On the stump, McCain promises to veto any earmarked spending. But that is a gesture, providing about $18 billion a year. (And he isn't exactly consistent. McCain often tells folks who defend a local project that it is the process, not the individual project, that he opposes.) Perhaps that's why McCain calls for raising Medicare taxes on seniors with incomes of $50,000 or more per year and taxing employer-based health care benefits for families. Working people and seniors will help pay the tab for the corporate tax giveaway.

It's hard not to wonder about the pure, contrary inanity of the current conservative position. Our military is by far the strongest in the world, while our trains are among the slowest and our sewers are collapsing. So they propose raising spending on the military and cutting domestic investment. We suffer gilded age inequality, with the wealthiest 15,000 families -- one one-hundredth of 1 percent of the population -- capturing fully one-fourth of the entire income growth from 2000 to 2006. Their average income rose from $15.2 million per year to $29.7 million per year. Meanwhile, the rest of us -- 133 million households that make up 90 percent of the country -- divided up 4 percent of the nation's income, adding about $305 to our average $30,354 income. So conservatives push for more tax cuts for the wealthy, while proposing to tax employer-based health benefits. Corporate profits (prior to the recession) have catapulted to what is by far the highest percentage of national income in the past half century. So they want to cut corporate taxes, inevitably increasing the burden on labor. The economic future looks dim because consumers, drowning in debt, are cutting back. So they suggest cutting taxes on corporate investments to generate new investments and growth -- as if companies don't need someone to buy the products they make.

Maybe that will be Steve Martin's next routine: how to sell more stuff and not have customers. Somehow, it doesn't sound so funny. "

Most Corporations Don't Pay Income Taxes, by Richard Rubin, Congressional Quarterly (August 12, 2008)

"  Most corporations, including the vast majority of foreign companies doing business in the United States, pay no income taxes, according to a Government Accountability Office report released Tuesday.

    During the eight-year period covered by the report, 72 percent of foreign-owned corporations went at least one year without owing taxes, and the same was true for 55 percent of domestic corporations.

    Small companies were much more likely to pay no taxes than larger companies. Still, more than 3,500 large domestic corporations - with more than $250 million in assets or $50 million in gross receipts - did not pay taxes in 2005.

    The report said about 80 percent of the companies studied paid no taxes because they didn't generate any profit after expenses. Money-losing companies can legitimately owe no tax, and others can use provisions of the tax code to lower or eliminate their liability.

    But the lawmakers who sought the data seized on the report as proof of corporate gamesmanship.

    "It's shameful that so many corporations make big profits and pay nothing to support our country," said Byron L. Dorgan , D-N.D., who requested the report along with Carl Levin , D-Mich. "The tax system that allows this wholesale tax avoidance is an embarrassment and unfair to hardworking Americans who pay their fair share of taxes. We need to plug these tax loopholes and put these corporations back on the tax rolls."

    The report covered the period from 1998 through 2005. During that time, corporate income taxes as a share of gross domestic product dipped, from 2.2 percent in 1998 to 1.2 percent in 2003, the lowest share since 1983. But receipts jumped after that, hitting 2.7 percent in 2006 and 2007, according to the Office of Management and Budget. That was the highest share since the late 1970s.

    The GAO report also found that foreign-owned corporations were somewhat more likely to report no income than domestic corporations. There are several possible reasons for that. Foreign corporations may be younger, and startups are more likely to have no net income after expenses. They may also be in industries with lower profit margins.

    Another possibility could be the use of transfer pricing, which companies use to account for transactions between subsidiaries in different countries. Creative, rule-stretching use of transfer pricing can allow companies to push their profits into lower-taxed jurisdictions. The report does not attempt to examine whether illegal transfer-pricing caused the difference between foreign and domestic companies.

    But companies looking for lower-taxed jurisdictions often take profits out of the United States. The country's 35 percent top rate on corporate income is among the highest in the industrialized world.

...."

Spotted Owl Habitat Slashed as Population Declines, by Jeff Barnard, AP (August 12, 2008)

"Grants Pass, Oregon - The Bush administration has decided the northern spotted owl can get by with less old-growth forest habitat as it struggles to make its way off the threatened species list.

    The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Tuesday that the federal forest land designated as critical habitat for the owl in Washington, Oregon and Northern California would be cut by 23 percent, a reduction of 1.6 million acres. Critical habitat is a requirement of the Endangered Species Act and offers increased protections against logging.

    Research shows that spotted owl numbers are dropping by 4 percent annually as a result of logging, wildfires and an invasion of its habitat by the barred owl, a more aggressive East Coast cousin that migrated across Canada and has been working its way south.

    Conservation groups said the critical habitat designation and a new plan for restoring owl populations were contrary to the advice of leading scientists and crafted to fulfill a Bush administration promise to the timber industry to increase logging.

    Both the plan and the habitat designation appear certain to be headed for court.

    "This is a parting gift from the Bush administration to its timber friends," said Kristen Boyles, an attorney with Earthjustice in Seattle, a public interest environmental law firm that has been fighting for the owl for two decades. "It flies in the face of the science that says we need to protect more habitat, not less."

    Tom Partin, president of the American Forest Resources Council in Portland, said the recovery plan and critical habitat would make it more difficult to thin overgrown forests to reduce the risks to wildlife and to promote the old-growth characteristics the owls favor.

..."

Bush to Relax Protected Species Rules, by Dina Cappiello, AP (August 11, 2008)

"Washington - Parts of the Endangered Species Act may soon be extinct. The Bush administration wants federal agencies to decide for themselves whether highways, dams, mines and other construction projects might harm endangered animals and plants.

    New regulations, which don't require the approval of Congress, would reduce the mandatory, independent reviews government scientists have been performing for 35 years, according to a draft first obtained by The Associated Press.

    Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne said late Monday the changes were needed to ensure that the Endangered Species Act would not be used as a "back door" to regulate the gases blamed for global warming. In May, the polar bear became the first species declared as threatened because of climate change. Warming temperatures are expected to melt the sea ice the bear depends on for survival.

    The draft rules would bar federal agencies from assessing the emissions from projects that contribute to global warming and its effect on species and habitats.

    "We need to focus our efforts where they will do the most good," Kempthorne said in a news conference organized quickly after AP reported details of the proposal. "It is important to use our time and resources to protect the most vulnerable species. It is not possible to draw a link between greenhouse gas emissions and distant observations of impacts on species."

    If approved, the changes would represent the biggest overhaul of endangered species regulations since 1986. They would accomplish through rules what conservative Republicans have been unable to achieve in Congress: ending some environmental reviews that developers and other federal agencies blame for delays and cost increases on many projects.

    The chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee, which oversees the Interior Department, said he was "deeply troubled" by the changes.

    "This proposed rule ... gives federal agencies an unacceptable degree of discretion to decide whether or not to comply with the Endangered Species Act," said Rep. Nick Rahall, D-W.Va. "Eleventh-hour rulemakings rarely if ever lead to good government."

    The new regulations follow a pattern by the Bush administration not to seek input from its scientists. The regulations were drafted by attorneys at both the Interior and Commerce Departments. Scientists with both agencies were first briefed on the proposal last week during a conference call, according to an official who asked not to be identified.

    Last month, in similar fashion, the Environmental Protection Agency surprised its scientific experts when it decided it did not want to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act.

    The rule changes unveiled Monday would apply to any project a federal agency would fund, build or authorize that the agency itself determines is unlikely to harm endangered wildlife and their habitat. Government wildlife experts currently participate in tens of thousands of such reviews each year.

    The revisions also would limit which effects can be considered harmful and set a 60-day deadline for wildlife experts to evaluate a project when they are asked to become involved. If no decision is made within 60 days, the project can move ahead.

    "If adopted, these changes would seriously weaken the safety net of habitat protections that we have relied upon to protect and recover endangered fish, wildlife and plants for the past 35 years," said John Kostyack, executive director of the National Wildlife Federation's Wildlife Conservation and Global Warming initiative.

    Under current law, federal agencies must consult with experts at the Fish and Wildlife Service or the National Marine Fisheries Service to determine whether a project is likely to jeopardize any endangered species or to damage habitat, even if no harm seems likely. This initial review usually results in accommodations that better protect the 1,353 animals and plants in the U.S. listed as threatened or endangered and determines whether a more formal analysis is warranted.

    The Interior Department said such consultations are no longer necessary because federal agencies have developed expertise to review their own construction and development projects, according to the 30-page draft obtained by the AP.

    "We believe federal action agencies will err on the side of caution in making these determinations," the proposal said.

    The director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, Dale Hall, said the changes would help focus expertise on "where we know we don't have a negative effect on the species but where the agency is vulnerable if we don't complete a consultation."

    Responding to questions about the process, Hall said, "We will not do anything that leaves the public out of this process."

    The new rules were expected to be formally proposed immediately, officials said. They would be subject to a 30-day public comment period before being finalized by the Interior Department. That would give the administration enough time to impose the rules before November's presidential election. A new administration could freeze any pending regulations or reverse them, a process that could take months. Congress could also overturn the rules through legislation, but that could take even longer.

    The proposal was drafted largely by attorneys in the general counsel's offices of the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the Interior Department, according to an official with the National Marine Fisheries Service, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plan hadn't yet been circulated publicly. The two agencies' experts were not consulted until last week, the official said.

    Between 1998 and 2002, the Fish and Wildlife Service conducted 300,000 consultations. The National Marine Fisheries Service, which evaluates projects affecting marine species, conducts about 1,300 reviews each year.

    The reviews have helped safeguard protected species such as bald eagles, Florida panthers and whooping cranes. A federal government handbook from 1998 described the consultations as "some of the most valuable and powerful tools to conserve listed species."

    In recent years, however, some federal agencies and private developers have complained that the process results in delays and increased construction costs.

    "We have always had concerns with respect to the need for streamlining and making it a more efficient process," said Joe Nelson, a lawyer for the National Endangered Species Act Reform Coalition, a trade group for home builders and the paper and farming industry.

    Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, called the proposed changes illegal.

    "This proposed regulation is another in a continuing stream of proposals to repeal our landmark environmental laws through the back door," she said. "If this proposed regulation had been in place, it would have undermined our ability to protect the bald eagle, the grizzly bear and the gray whale."

    The Bush administration and Congress have attempted with mixed success to change the law.

    In 2003, the administration imposed similar rules that would have allowed agencies to approve new pesticides and projects to reduce wildfire risks without asking the opinion of government scientists about whether threatened or endangered species and habitats might be affected. The pesticide rule was later overturned in court. The Interior Department, along with the Forest Service, is currently being sued over the rule governing wildfire prevention.

    In 2005, the House passed a bill that would have made similar changes to the Endangered Species Act, but the bill died in the Senate.

    The sponsor of that bill, then-House Natural Resources chairman Richard Pombo, R-Calif., told the AP Monday that allowing agencies to judge for themselves the effects of a project will not harm species or habitat.

    "There is no way they can rubber stamp everything because they will end up in court for every decision," he said.

    But internal reviews by the National Marine Fisheries Service and Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that about half the unilateral evaluations by the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management that determined wildfire prevention projects were unlikely to harm protected species were not legally or scientifically valid.

    Those had been permitted under the 2003 rule changes.

    "This is the fox guarding the hen house. The interests of agencies will outweigh species protection interests," said Eric Glitzenstein, the attorney representing environmental groups in the lawsuit over the wildfire prevention regulations. "What they are talking about doing is eviscerating the Endangered Species Act." "

Greed Above, Death Below, NY Times Editorial (August 6, 2008)

"The need for a criminal inquiry into the Crandall Canyon mine disaster is shockingly clear now that investigators have detailed how greedy mine operators concealed danger warnings and literally chiseled underground pillar supports to the breaking point. The roof of the Utah mine collapsed last summer, killing six miners and leading three would-be rescuers to their deaths.

    The mine's operator, Genwal Resources, a subsidiary of the Murray Energy Corporation, has insisted that an earthquake caused the collapse. But a federal investigation concluded that the mine was "primed for a massive pillar collapse" after management mined beyond safety limits to scrape extra coal profits from the floor and supports. Compounding the tragedy, the company never alerted federal monitors to three earlier outbursts - the last only three days before the disaster - in which pressure from above caused coal to explode from winnowed supports. No miners were harmed, but the company clearly was alerted to trouble brewing below.

    Separate investigations by mine safety and Labor Department officials have left grieving families haunted by evidence that the deaths might have been avoided if the company had not flouted deep-mine safety rules. Investigators found the company's engineering plan was dangerous in its design and should never have been accepted by the Mine Safety and Health Administration. Existing computer models could have demonstrated this, but overseers failed to consult them. The safety administration also failed to take full control of the rescue.

    Crandall Canyon provided a gross demonstration of regulators' obeisance to the industry. This is a life-threatening flaw that has grown under the Bush administration's pro-industry practices. The need for stronger laws and more conscientious regulation grows urgent as the industry booms once more in the energy crisis. The men buried in Crandall Canyon deserve justice."

Nike's Focus on Keeping Costs Low Causes Poor Working Conditions, Critics Say, by Richard Read, The Oregonian (August 5, 2008)

   "The sports apparel giant's focus on keeping factory costs low affects working conditions.

    Nike contract factories will abuse workers, critics say, as long as the company forces the plants to make shoes and apparel for ever-lower prices.

    "As long as they continue to pay sweatshop prices," says Scott Nova, executive director of the Worker Rights Consortium, a labor-rights monitoring organization in Washington, D.C., "they're going to continue to get sweatshop conditions."

    Not true, say managers of the Beaverton-area shoe giant. Nike can't change industry conditions, they say, without help from other companies, governments and workers' rights groups.

    The controversy sounds like a debate from the 1990s, when student groups and others regularly lambasted Nike. Critics now say Nike's manufacturing structure is exploitative, while company officials defend the free-market approach. They say their operations have helped propel nations to prosperity.

    "The real way to address this is for the brands to collaborate and agree on a core set of standards," says Erin Dobson, Nike's director of corporate-responsibility communications. "Our monitors aren't going to catch everything."

    Nike staff members swung into action recently after an Australian television station exposed squalid living conditions, garnisheed wages and withheld passports of foreign workers at a Malaysian factory. Nike is arranging approved housing, refunds and trips home for workers at the Hytex Group T-shirt plant outside Kuala Lumpur.

    An Australian activist organization, the Committee to Protect Vietnamese Workers, claims credit for helping reporter Mike Duffy uncover the story, which has Nike inspecting all 37 of its Malaysian contract factories. Trung Doan, the committee's general secretary, says his organization had learned of similar abuses by interviewing more than 100 Vietnamese people working in Malaysian industries ranging from electronics to timber.

    "Nike is neither alone nor the worst in Malaysia or Vietnam," Doan says. "There are others and worse, employers who break the law, break their own ethics codes, or in any case treat workers very badly. We plan to name and shame some more."

    Contradictory Goals

    Nova, of the Worker Rights organization, says Nike can't hide behind its independent contract factories because the company picks plants on the basis of price.

    "Factory owners are being asked to do two mutually contradictory things: improve standards and cut prices," Nova said. "The factories do everything they possibly can to hold down labor costs, and they hope nobody catches them" for violating labor standards.

    Nike and other companies repeatedly jump from factory to factory, Nova says, instead of sticking with plants, paying them slightly more to meet standards and rewarding them when they do. Nike's supply chain of about 700 plants in 52 countries is far too big to monitor, he says.

    Nike's Dobson says that in fact the company has begun to consolidate production, especially following the recent abolition of global textile quotas that set amounts firms could order from various countries.

    "You have an ability to identify factory groups and build longer-term partnerships," she says.

...."

Wal-Mart Warns of Democratic Win, by Ann Zimmerman and Kris Maher, Wall Street Journal (August 1, 2008)

"Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is mobilizing its store managers and department supervisors around the country to warn that if Democrats win power in November, they'll likely change federal law to make it easier for workers to unionize companies - including Wal-Mart.

    In recent weeks, thousands of Wal-Mart store managers and department heads have been summoned to mandatory meetings at which the retailer stresses the downside for workers if stores were to be unionized.

    According to about a dozen Wal-Mart employees who attended such meetings in seven states, Wal-Mart executives claim that employees at unionized stores would have to pay hefty union dues while getting nothing in return, and may have to go on strike without compensation. Also, unionization could mean fewer jobs as labor costs rise.

    The actions by Wal-Mart - the nation's largest private employer - reflect a growing concern among big business that a reinvigorated labor movement could reverse years of declining union membership. That could lead to higher payroll and health costs for companies already being hurt by rising fuel and commodities costs and the tough economic climate.

    The Wal-Mart human-resources managers who run the meetings don't specifically tell attendees how to vote in November's election, but make it clear that voting for Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama would be tantamount to inviting unions in, according to Wal-Mart employees who attended gatherings in Maryland, Missouri and other states.

    "The meeting leader said, 'I am not telling you how to vote, but if the Democrats win, this bill will pass and you won't have a vote on whether you want a union,'" said a Wal-Mart customer-service supervisor from Missouri. "I am not a stupid person. They were telling me how to vote," she said.

...."

Law and Order: Curfew America, by David Usborne, Independent/UK (August 20, 2008)

"HARTFORD, Connecticut - The police state has not arrived quite yet but it may feel like it to the residents of some American cities, where a handful of embattled mayors and police chiefs are imposing strict and sometimes sweeping curfews as a last resort to quell new waves of gun violence this summer. 

"We must do this because we cannot and will not tolerate innocent people, especially children, to be victims," insists Eddie Perez, the Mayor of Hartford, the capital of Connecticut, where a night-time curfew was introduced last week and will remain in effect for a month for those under 18 years old.

Nor are there any apologies from the authorities in Helena-West Helena on the banks of the Mississippi in Arkansas, small pockets of which are under a24-hour curfew that all ages must respect. Police are enforcing it, moreover, with night-vision goggles and M16 military rifles.

In Hartford, the centre of America's insurance industry, the approach is not quite as militaristic. Children found on the streets between 9pm and 5am are approached and escorted by officers to their homes. Most nights since the curfew came into effect last Thursday have seen only a dozen or so picked up.

But there was nothing softly-softly about the violence that prompted Hartford to take such action. Two weekends ago, 11 people were shot in three different attacks, the worst at the annual West Indian Parade in the city's North End, which left one man dead and two children hurt. A toddler in a pushchair was grazed by bullet on her leg. A seven-year-old boy remains in hospital with serious head wounds.

"I am still traumatised," says Darlene Johnson, 44, who had a food stall at the parade with her husband and father. "I see this man pulling this long gun from under his shirt and he started shooting. I just couldn't believe it. Some people thought it was firecrackers but I knew different. I saw the little girl rubbing her leg and the boy with blood coming out of his head."

Much of the city cannot believe it either, yet 150 shootings have been recorded this year In summer, bored teenagers have little to do but wander the streets. Gangs mark out turf. Insults are traded and revenge is taken. The man killed at the parade, Ezekial Roberts, had been running with gangs.

While curfews sound like they belong in war zones or natural disaster areas, they have long been a popular tool of US police departments. And it is in the dog days of summer, when humidity and violence seem to join hands, that they most often come into vogue. For the duration of the school holidays this year, for instance, Baltimore has an 11pm curfew (midnight on Fridays and Saturdays) for children under 17. Those who violate it are taken to a school until a parent or guardian picks them up.

It is a trend the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), does not welcome. The group "opposes juvenile curfews because they're essentially a violation of fundamental rights of innocent people," said David McGuire of the Connecticut ACLU. "Curfews essentially are placing an entire demographic, in this case, youth, under house arrest for the inappropriate actions of a few."

Residents of Connecticut's north end, however, tired of the shootings, seem mostly to support the curfew, though few believe it alone will solve the larger problems of young people with little to do, attracted by gangs and lacking discipline. "We need to keep the young people off the streets," says Ms Johnson on the front steps of her home. "And the parents need help. The law is the law." Taquana Quan, 18, standing outside Burger and Pizza Land on Barbour Avenue, where two other men were shot on the same weekend, also supports the Mayor's decision. So does his cousin, Shantay Taytay, who is 21. They have had enough. "This dude pulled a gun on me last week to take my bike. We are moving to Atlanta, the whole family."

...."

Court Filings Reveal Evidence Against Stevens,by Del Quentin Wilber, Washington Post (August 16, 2008)

"Prosecutors possess recordings of Senator promising to help oil company.

    Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) quickly turned a $5,000 Florida condo investment into a profit of more than $100,000 in a questionable transaction that federal prosecutors would like to introduce as evidence at his trial next month on charges that he lied on financial disclosure forms.

    The investment and other details of investigators' case were disclosed late Thursday in a flurry of court papers filed by prosecutors and defense lawyers gearing up for the first trial of a sitting US Senator in more than two decades. The trial is tentatively scheduled to start Sept. 22.

    Stevens was indicted last month by a federal grand jury on charges of not reporting on Senate financial disclosure forms that he accepted more than $250,000 in gifts and home renovations from executives of Veco, a now defunct oil services company in Alaska. Prosecutors allege that Stevens helped Veco and its executives on a variety of federal and state issues.

    Veco's former chief executive, Bill Allen, pleaded guilty last year to bribing public officials and is expected to testify at Stevens's trial.

    In court papers filed Thursday, prosecutors revealed new details about ties between Veco's executives and Stevens. Among the revelations: Prosecutors possess tape-recorded conversations in which Stevens said he would help Veco executives with stalled state legislation needed to authorize construction of a natural gas pipeline.

    In one tape-recorded call, Stevens told Allen that he and one of his sons -- then the Alaska state Senate president -- would "try to see if I can get some bigwigs from back here to go up there and say, 'Look, you just gotta make up your mind, you gotta get this done,' " prosecutors wrote.

    Stevens himself later urged a state Senate committee to pass the pipeline legislation, prosecutors wrote.

    Prosecutors allege that Veco's executives asked for other favors from Stevens and his staff, including help winning a sizable federal grant and assistance in obtaining federal funding for a job-training program.

    Stevens's lawyers did not respond to messages seeking comment on the new allegations.

...."

Mukasey Won't Pursue Charges in Hiring Inquiry, by eric Lichtblau, NY Times (August 12, 2008)

" Washington - Attorney General Michael Mukasey on Tuesday rejected the idea of criminally prosecuting former Justice Department employees who improperly used political litmus tests in hiring decisions, saying he had already taken strong internal steps in response to a "painful" episode.

    Two recent reports from the Justice Department inspector general and its internal ethics office have found that about a half-dozen officials at the Justice Department - all but one now gone - systematically rejected candidates with perceived "liberal" backgrounds for what were supposed to be non-political jobs and sought out conservative Republicans.

    In a speech Tuesday morning to the American Bar Association in New York, Mr. Mukasey acknowledged that some critics and commentators have called on the Justice Department to take what he called "more drastic steps" in dealing with the scandal, including prosecuting those at fault and firing those hired through flawed procedures.

    "Where there is enough evidence to charge someone with a crime, we vigorously prosecute," he said. "But not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime," he said. As the inspector general's report acknowledged, the hiring violations were such a case, because the wrongdoing violated federal civil service law, but not criminal law, he said.

    "That does not mean, as some people have suggested, that those officials who were found by the joint reports to have committed misconduct have suffered no consequences," Mr. Mukasey said. "Far from it. The officials most directly implicated in the misconduct left the Department to the accompaniment of substantial negative publicity.

    "Their misconduct has now been laid bare by the Justice Department for all to see," he continued. "As a general matter in such cases, where disciplinary referrals are appropriate, they are made. To put it in concrete terms, I doubt that anyone in this room would want to trade places with any of those people."

    Mr. Mukasey also said it would be unfair, and possibly illegal, for the department to go back and reassign or dismiss those lawyers and other employees who were hired in part because they were seen as trusted conservatives. "Two wrongs do not make a right," he said.

    The inspector general is expected to issue at least two additional reports on the politicization of the Justice Department, including his findings on the firings of nine United States attorneys in late 2006 under then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. "

Follow This Dime: Why Misgovernment Was No Accident in George W. Bush's Washington, by Thomas Frank, TomDispatch.com (August 4, 2008)

"Washington is the city where the scandals happen. Every American knows this, but we also believe, if only vaguely, that the really monumental scandals are a thing of the past, that the golden age of misgovernment-for-profit ended with the cavalry charge and the robber barons, at about the same time presidents stopped wearing beards.

    I moved to Washington in 2003, just in time for the comeback, for the hundred-year flood. At first it was only a trickle in the basement, a little stream released accidentally by the president's friends at Enron. Before long, though, the levees were failing all over town, and the city was inundated with a muddy torrent of graft.

    How are we to dissect a deluge like this one? We might begin by categorizing the earmarks handed out by Congress, sorting the foolish earmarks from the costly earmarks from the earmarks made strictly on a cash basis. We could try a similar approach to government contracting: the no-bid contracts, the no-oversight contracts, the no-experience contracts, the contracts handed out to friends of the vice president. We might consider the shoplifting career of one of the president's former domestic policy advisers or the habitual plagiarism of the president's liaison to the Christian right. And we would certainly have to find some way to parse the extraordinary incompetence of the executive branch, incompetence so fulsome and steady and reliable that at some point Americans stopped being surprised and began simply to count on it, to think of incompetence as the way government works.

    But the onrushing flow swamps all taxonomies. Mass firing of federal prosecutors; bribing of newspaper columnists; pallets of shrink-wrapped cash "misplaced" in Iraq; inexperienced kids running the Baghdad stock exchange; the discovery that many of Alaska's leading politicians are apparently on the take - our heads swim. We climb to the rooftop, but we cannot find the heights of irony from which we might laugh off the blend of thug and Pharisee that was Tom DeLay - or dispel the nauseating suspicion, quickly becoming a certainty, that the government of our nation deliberately fibbed us into a pointless, catastrophic war.

    Bad Apples All Around

    So let us begin on the solid ground of these simple facts: this spectacular episode of misrule has coincided with both the political triumph of conservatism and with the rise of the Washington area to the richest rank of American metropolises. In the period I am describing, gentlemen of the right rolled throug