Hiatus

Again, I'm on hiatus for a bit. Be back shortly after Labor Day (Sept. 1).

"Flypaper" still resonates

I can't believe there still are advocates of the "flypaper theory" popping their heads up now that the UN offices were blown up in Baghdad yesterday. In an appearance on PBS' Newshour with Jim Lehrer, a retired emerging threats officer for Army intelligence, Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters, suggested that the bombing

works out quite well for us [the United States] because with the terrorists rushing into Iraq and getting themselves killed by and large by our forces who are fighting them very effectively, we don't have to deal with them here in Manhattan, Washington or Miami.

So we took the war on terror to our enemy's camp, to Afghanistan and Iraq. It doesn't mean it's easy. This is going to drag on for a very long time. But we're on the enemy's ground. They don't like it. They're coming out trying to kill us. We're killing them. That's why it's a war.

So, by this logic, the Iraq war was just a massive P20G operation -- ya know, something to "smoke the evil ones out of their holes" so "our boys" can pick 'em off one-by-one.

This registers pretty high on the absurdity scale...

Stretched Thin

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, the chair of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, argues that the US doesn't have enough military personnel "for the post-September 11 era of national security" in an op-ed piece for the Washington Times.

Hutchison does not advocate any specific solution for this problem, but I imagine some sort of mandatory service act has to be somewhere on her list of options. There already is a bill floating around Congress to reinstate the draft, and it would not surprise me if someone were to tinker with it in the coming months/years.

Sure, the military does not want untrained civilians manning helicopter gunships or tanks -- they add "no value," remember? -- but it could use some help with policing and related "constabulary duties."

Mass graves to reveal Iraq war toll

They're uncovering more mass graves in Iraq with each passing day. But, alas, these are "good" mass graves, so you won't be hearing much about them in the media.

Short and Sweet

* With the current occupant of the White House, it feels just like the '80s. All the big players are back, too!

* The bill for rebuilding and occupying Iraq could reach $600 billion. As the US steps back from asking the UN for help, it looks like the American people are going to be footing the vast majority of this bill.

* What's a neocon? Let Jim Lobe explain, then check out what the original 'neo,' Irving Kristol, has to say.

* Howard Dean? Pro and con.

* Daniel Pipes, as I mentioned before, was nominated by the Bush administration to serve on the board of the government's leading peace think tank. Pipes is in danger of being rejected by a Senate panel which oversees the nomination, so Bush is going to appoint Pipes, thus bypassing the entire confirmation process.

* "A former Energy Department intelligence chief who agreed with the White House claim that Iraq had reconstituted its defunct nuclear-arms program was awarded a total of $20,500 in bonuses during the build-up to the war," reports WorldNetDaily. The lowdown:

Thomas Rider, as acting director of Energy's intelligence office, overruled senior intelligence officers on his staff in voting for the position at a National Foreign Intelligence Board meeting at CIA headquarters last September.

His officers argued at a pre-briefing at Energy headquarters that there was no hard evidence to support the alarming Iraq nuclear charge, and asked to join State Department's dissenting opinion, Energy officials say.

Rider ordered them to "shut up and sit down," according to sources familiar with the meeting.

As a result, State was the intelligence community's lone dissenter in the key National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction, something the Bush administration is quick to remind critics of its prewar intelligence...

Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham gave Rider a $13,000 performance bonus after the NIE report was released and just before the war, department sources say. He had received an additional $7,500 before the report.

"That's a hell of a lot of money for an intelligence director who had no experience or background in intelligence, and who'd only been running the office for nine months," said one source who requested anonymity. "Something's fishy."

* The United States' next target? No, not Syria, Iran, or North Korea. It's Al-Jazeera.

* Donald Rumsfeld threatened to charge them as war criminals a few months ago. Now, the human shields that went to Iraq before the war face up to 12 years in prison and $1 million in fines.

* Hemant Lakhani was caught by US intelligence trying to sell shoulder-launched missiles to alleged terrorists in a setup. While the threat of these types of missiles is very real, Lakhani's a small, inexperienced fish in a very large pond of weapons smugglers.

* Dr. Hatfield or Dr. Zack? Who's the true anthrax suspect?

* The US has no idea how may prisoners are being held at Guantanamo Bay, nevermind the identities of hundreds of the inmates.

* About the Al Franken-Fox suit...oh boy. No comment. Too bad I missed Fair 'n' Balanced Friday...

* A pay cut for the troops? The Pentagon now says no.

* The EPA's response to 9/11 was driven by politics. Gee, that's shocking.

* Afghanistan continues to be rocked by violence, as the US is shifting intelligence personnel out of that strife-ridden nation in order to deal with the mess in Iraq. Meanwhile: Zabul, the strategically important province between Kabul and Kandahar, has reportedly been seized by the Taliban.

* Enjoying the PATRIOT Act, are we? Then get ready for the similarly Orwellian-sounding VICTORY Act!

* The good folks at Cursor have compiled all of the available excerpts of Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber's Weapons of Mass Deception: "The Fog of War Talk," "True Lies," "Trading on Fear," and "How To Sell a War."

* Stauber and Rampton have got Brian Eno thinking. "What occurs to me in reading their book is that the new American approach to social control is so much more sophisticated and pervasive that it really deserves a new name," Eno writes in the Guardian. "It isn't just propaganda any more, it's 'prop-agenda'. It's not so much the control of what we think, but the control of what we think about. When our governments want to sell us a course of action, they do it by making sure it's the only thing on the agenda, the only thing everyone's talking about. And they pre-load the ensuing discussion with highly selected images, devious and prejudicial language, dubious linkages, weak or false 'intelligence' and selected 'leaks'."

* Judith Miller's back in the crosshairs. This time around Alex Cockburn is critiquing her -- and the NY Times' -- witting cheerleading for war.

* More than 5.6 million Americans -- 1 in 37 -- have spent time in jail. "If current trends continue," the CSM reports, "it means that a black male in the United States would have about a 1 in 3 chance of going to prison during his lifetime. For a Hispanic male, it's 1 in 6; for a white male, 1 in 17."

* "Plamegate" has fallen off the radar recently. David Corn and John Dean revisit the story. Corn concludes that a thorough investigation is unlikely, while Dean thinks this scandal makes Bush worse than Nixon. After all, "Nixon never set up a hit on one of his enemies' wives."

* Bush the revisionist: We have seen "the end of combat operations major military operations" in Iraq.

* The US military has killed another journalist in Iraq. This time Mazen Dana, a Reuters cameraman, was gunned down at close range by "negligent" soldiers. The "trigger happy" soldier excuse can only go so far. There is a distinct pattern here, one that has the CPJ and RSF deeply disturbed.

* Back to the old tricks: Israel's use of torture has once again become routine.

* A consequence of the US economy's "jobless recovery": homelessness.

* The editors of the Washington Post sure are a bunch of heartless bastards for this editorial.

* US war planners ignore the lessons of Vietnam at their own peril, says Pepe Escobar of the Asia Times.

'nother break

On hiatus for a bit. Be back in the next few days.

'Toons

Rebuild Afghanistan Iraq! Vote Ah-nuld! Fail Dubya!

Time off?

It's summer time, and millions of Americans are enjoying their "working vacations."

The fruits of Kay's labor

The Boston Globe reports that David Kay, the US' chief hound for WMD in Iraq, claims to have "uncovered solid information from interviews, documents, and physical evidence that Iraqi military forces were ordered to attack US troops with chemical weapons, but did not have the time or capability to follow through."

Bob Novak is also reporting that Kay "has found substantial evidence of biological weapons in Iraq, plus considerable missile development. He has been less successful in locating chemical weapons, and has not yet begun a substantial effort to locate progress toward nuclear arms."

The goodies allegedly unearthed by Kay will be presented to the public sometime in mid-September, says Novak.

The Premature War

"The United States military, the Central Intelligence Agency and Iraqi exiles began a broad covert effort inside Iraq at least three months before the war to forge alliances with Iraqi military leaders and persuade commanders not to fight," reports Sunday's NY Times.

This news does not come as a surprise, especially since revelations about the premature bombings to "soften up" Iraqi defenses came to light, but it nonetheless blows another hole in the claim the administration repeatedly made in the months preceding the assault that they were doing their best to avoid war. "No decision yet" is what Wolfie, Ari, Colin, Dick, and, yes, even George kept telling the press in mid-late 2002. They were, obviously, lying.

In reality, the decision was immediately made to use 9/11 to justify a war in Iraq. After the Afghan bloodletting, the plan was set into motion and the appeal to the UN in Fall 2002 was used to garner as much support as possible, since the administration had to give the military a few months for a troop buildup anyway and needed time to "market the war."

Lying about the Iraqi nuclear threat

Following up on Friday's piece, the Washington Post leads with a long, front page article in Sunday's edition which asserts that the Bush administration lied about Iraq's nuclear program in order to muster support for war.

In their investigation, Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus found

a pattern in which President Bush, Vice President Cheney and their subordinates -- in public and behind the scenes -- made allegations depicting Iraq's nuclear weapons program as more active, more certain and more imminent in its threat than the data they had would support. On occasion administration advocates withheld evidence that did not conform to their views. The White House seldom corrected misstatements or acknowledged loss of confidence in information upon which it had previously relied...

Ok. So what happens when you turn to the editorial page of the Post in the very same edition? There you find the editors chiding Democrats (Al Gore, specifically) for...umm...pointing out the fact that the Bush administration lied.

Ah, the wonders of American media.

(PS - Hey, turns out Colin Powell is up to his neck in lies, too)

"...determined to keep the idea before the public as it built its case for war"

Kudos to the Washington Post for keeping on top of the Niger uranium/Bush-lied-in-the-SOTU story, while seemingly every other media outlet has moved on to more "pressing" matters (like Kobe's case and the recall circus in California).

The Post's Walter Pincus reminds us that there was a concerted effort to push the Niger uranium claim, even when everyone in the administration likely knew it was dubious.

Democracy for Sale

Greg Palast's book, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, is being serialized over at Working For Change. For convenience, Benedict@Large has collated the ten segments of "The Unreported Story of How They Fixed the Vote in Florida." Mosey on over, especially if you aren't familiar with the Choicepoint scandal.

Rehabbing Iraq's oil, with immunity

Bechtel, one of Halliburton's chief rivals, is complaining that the bidding process to rebuild Iraq's oil industry is slanted towards Cheney's ex-company. Gee, surprise, surprise...

Oh, and have you heard about Executive Order 13303, which Bush signed back in May? It gives US oil companies immunity from lawsuits and criminal prosecution in connection with the sale of Iraqi oil.

This story is just starting to get some play in the media.

Bushies distort science to fit their agenda

Rep. Henry Waxman has issued a new report which accuses the Bush administration of misrepresenting scientific research in order to lend credence to its political agenda and initiatives.

Messing with Iran

Knut Royce and Timothy M. Phelps of Newsday report that the "Pentagon hardliners pressing for regime change in Iran have held secret and unauthorized meetings in Paris with a controversial arms dealer who was a major figure in the Iran-contra scandal."

So, while the Bush administration is allegedly "paralyzed over Iran," other forces just outside the administration are doing their best to undermine the Iranian leadership and foment some kind of internal revolt.

Michael Ledeen -- who else? -- is probably the person who has been coordinating the meetings between two of Douglas Feith's underlings, Harold Rhode and Larry Franklin, and Manucher Ghorbanifar, the infamous businessman who facilitated the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran in the 1980s.

War on the Korean Peninsula?

James "World War IV" Woolsey has outlined a war plan against North Korea which could topple the regime in one to two months. According to the Toronto Globe & Mail,

The plan would include 4,000 daily air strikes against North Korean targets, the deployment of cruise missiles and stealth aircraft to destroy the Yongbyon nuclear plant and other nuclear facilities, the stationing of U.S. Marine forces off the coasts of North Korea to threaten a land attack on Pyongyang, the deployment of two additional U.S. Army divisions to bolster South Korean troops in a land offensive against North Korea, and the call-up of National Guard and Reserve units to replace U.S. combat forces that are currently bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan...

[There is a] risk that U.S. military strikes could trigger an explosion of radiation from North Korean nuclear plants, along with massive artillery attacks against Seoul by the North Korean heavy guns that are hidden in hardened underground bunkers on the border.

But U.S. cruise missiles and stealth aircraft could launch precision bombing attacks that would "minimize radiation leakage" at Yongbyon, while also sealing shut the underground bunkers where the artillery pieces are hidden...

No mention of potential casualties in this story, but the last plan floated by the hawks in the Pentagon estimated up to one million during the first day of the assault.

Rice Likens Iraq Path to Civil Rights Struggle

Shameless.

National security adviser Condoleezza Rice likened Iraq's halting path toward self-government to black Americans' struggle for civil rights in the 1960s, imploring black journalists Thursday to reject arguments that some people are incapable of democracy.

"We've heard that argument before, and we more than any should be ready to reject it," Rice told about 1,200 people at the National Association of Black Journalists.

"The view was wrong in 1963 in Birmingham, and it is wrong in 2003 in Baghdad and in the rest of the Middle East," she said.

This administration has shown a compunction to invoke any historically convenient analogy to justify what's going on in Iraq. And Bush is the one who accuses his critics of being revisionists...

The Attack on Nonprofits

According to Chisun Lee of the Village Voice, a new report by OMB Watch charges that a variety of social service organizations and nonprofits that disagree with the Bush administration on how to conduct social policy are facing harassment and bullying from the government.

20K injured in Iraq war

The researchers over at Iraq Body Count conclude that at least 20,000 Iraqi civilians suffered injuries of some sort during the war. This is in addition to the 6,000-8,000 deaths that the project has so far calculated.

With figures like these, it's no wonder the American forces are being met, increasingly, with resistance by the Iraqi population.

Oh dear god

Tell us what we want to hear

Josh Marshall has the scoop on Mahdi Obeidi, the Iraqi nuclear scientist who had parts of a gas centrifuge used for uranium enrichment buried in his backyard. Obeidi's apparently being held against his will in Kuwait because he's not telling his CIA handlers what they want to hear about Iraq's weapons program.

Iraq's oil will only pay part of rebuilding costs

The CSM's Howard LaFranchi reports that Iraqi oil revenues "will probably only be able to pay part of Iraq's operating expenses," even once production returns to pre-war levels. The revenues will likely amount to $15bn, while "Iraq needs $20 billion just to keep services at bare-bones levels."

Selective Outrage

Occupiers

A report by Knight Ridder's Drew Brown suggests that "Iraqis increasingly view American troops as foreign occupiers. And as attacks against U.S. troops continue, the low-level guerrilla war that American military officials say is being waged by former regime loyalists, foreign terrorists and criminals threatens to escalate into a wider nationalist struggle."

Wonderful.

No Sanctions for Israeli "Fence"

The US was supposedly thinking of reducing its loan guarantees to Israel in order to rein in the construction of the "separation barrier" in the West Bank. Ha'aretz, which first broke this story, is now reporting that Condi Rice assured Dov Weisglass, Ariel Sharon's bureau chief, that this will not happen.

Remembering Hiroshima & Nagasaki

"The fate of the world, and particularly the fate of humanity, may hang on how we remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki," declares David Krieger.

Indeed, how the bombings are contextualized (needless slaughter? necessary evil?) has undoubtedly affected the types of steps taken in the past half century. Unfortunately, the steps being taken right now -- from scrapping the government's nuclear watchdog, to prepping the next generation of nukes, to gearing up for deployment in space -- are predominantly in the wrong direction.

Curtailing Dissent; Managing War

A story in the July 25th edition of Stars and Stripes suggested that the US military would be curtailing its controversial embedded-journalist program in order to limit reporters' access to soldiers. Why? Because so many soldiers are complaining about their stay in Iraq. The military doesn't want this type of news getting published.

The 3rd Infantry Division, from where many of the most notorious complaints have been aired, has already "expelled many of its embedded reporters, and its troops are no longer allowed to talk to the media outside of pre-approved news features," reports PR Week.

Napin' Iraq

The US military has used firebombs - more or less, the equivalent of napalm - during the Iraq war.

"Marine Corps fighter pilots and commanders who have returned from the war zone have confirmed dropping dozens of incendiary bombs near bridges over the Saddam Canal and the Tigris River" during the military's drive on Baghdad in March and April, reports James W. Crawley of the San Diego Union-Tribune.

The military has made an extraordinary effort to distinguish these weapons from napalm, but the distinction is negligible.

In actuality, says James Alles, a commander of Marine Air Group 11 who oversaw one of the bombings, "The generals love napalm...It has a big psychological effect."

Indeed. Kilgore would be proud.

Media Privatisation and Conglomeration

The race is on to further privatize the internet, says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy.

"The Internet's early promise as a medium where text, audio, video and data can be freely exchanged and the public interest can be served is increasingly being relegated to history's dustbin," he writes. "Today, the part of the Net that is public and accessible is shrinking, while the part of the Net tied to round-the-clock billing is poised to grow exponentially...

"Of course, the last concern in corporate boardrooms and Congress is how the privatization of the Net will affect free speech and the public interest. Just as C-Span and public broadcasting were crumbs thrown to the public the last time new communications technologies were developed, there's been little talk about insulating public-interest uses from a more 'metered' Internet."

A related article from Newsweek's Robert J. Samuelson argues, broadly, that such privatisation has positive effects. A "tyranny of the market," he suggests, brings "a triumph of popular tastes."

The assumed wisdom, Samuelson declares, is that the FCC's recent decision to lessen media ownership restrictions "will worsen the menacing concentration of media power and that this will—to exaggerate only slightly—imperil free speech, the diversity of opinion and perhaps democracy itself. All this is more than overwrought; it completely misrepresents reality."

Past few days

Here's a condensed version of what I've missed recently. The bulk of what's below has to do with the Iraq war.

* Remember Osama? Recent stories from NBC News and Time suggest that the war on Al Qaeda was sacrificed for the war on Iraq. To make things worse, a related report from the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee concludes that the war to purge Hussein boosted Al Qaeda's recruiting efforts, as well.

* The report on 9/11 from the Congressional Joint Inquiry makes one thing clear: "The U.S. government had received repeated warnings of impending attacks—and attacks using planes directed at New York and Washington—for several years. The government never told us about what it knew was coming." And those missing pages? "If the people in the administration trying to link Iraq to Al Qaeda had one-one-thousandth of the stuff that the 28 pages has linking a foreign government to Al Qaeda, they would have been in good shape," says one official who has read the redacted part of the report. "If the 28 pages were to be made public, I have no question that the entire relationship with Saudi Arabia would change overnight."

* John Poindexter has resigned over the Pentagon's failed "betting parlor," the Policy Analysis Market (PAM).

* The Transportation Security Administration (TSA) has admitted that it maintains a no-fly list of antiwar activists.

* All of the key senior Iraqi scientists scientists currently in US custody deny the allegation that Saddam Hussein "reconstituted his nuclear weapons program or developed and hidden chemical or biological weapons since United Nations inspectors left in 1998," according to the Washington Post. Additionally, the AP reports that a Hussein aide claims the Iraqi leader "did in fact get rid of his weapons of mass destruction but deliberately kept the world guessing about it in an effort to divide the international community and stave off a U.S. invasion." While conceding that this was a "serious miscalculation," the story goes on to say that it was done "to make the Iraqi dictator look strong in the eyes of the Arab world."

* Dana Milbank and Mike Allen of the Washington Post report on the rhetorical shift in the Bush administration's discussion of the Iraq war. Echoing the neocon line, Iraq will now be posited as "the 'linchpin' to transform the Middle East and thereby reduce the terrorist threat to the United States." There's nothing like a healthy dose of bait 'n' switch.

* In another aspect of their offensive against war critics, the US and British governments are drawing up a "big impact" plan, which calls for both governments to amass and hoard evidence about Iraq's weapons program and release it all at once. The tactic, according to the Independent, "is designed to overwhelm and silence critics who have sought to put pressure on Tony Blair and George Bush. At the same time both men are working to lower the burden of proof -- from finding weapons to finding evidence that there were programmes to develop them, even if they lay dormant since the 1980s." Plus: Is some kind of WMD discovery imminent?

* The Guardian reports that US military casualties in Iraq "have been more than twice the number most Americans have been led to believe because of an extraordinarily high number of accidents, suicides and other non-combat deaths in the ranks that have gone largely unreported in the media." Of particular note: 827 soldiers have been wounded, nearly half of those since Bush's declaration of the cessation of formal hostilities on May 1. Meanwhile, casualties from Iraq and Afghanistan are literally overflowing Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC.

* The Tuwaitha Nuclear Research Center in Iraq was looted back in early April. Some pure uranium oxide from the site, which could be used to make a “dirty bomb,” is being offered for sale in a Basra market for $250,000, according to the Glasgow Sunday Herald.

* Should Saddam Hussein be taken dead or alive? Despite the alleged debate in the administration over this issue, Eric Margolis says the order will be to kill Hussein, rather than putting him before a tribunal where he could air the US' dirty laundry. After all, writes Margolis, "Dead dictators tell no tales."

* So far, the Bush administration is cool to the idea of approaching the UN for help in Iraq. That's not good news. In an address to the Brookings Institution last week, Senator Joe Biden of Delaware, the Ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, outlined why the Iraq occupation is going to be disastrous for the US unless the aid of other nations is enlisted. There are three options, according to Biden: "We can pull out, and lose Iraq. That’s a bad option; We can continue to do what we’re doing: provide 90 percent of the troops, 90 percent of the money, and nearly 100 percent of the deaths. That’s another, really bad option; Or, we can bring in the international community and empower Iraqis to bolster our efforts and legitimize a new Iraqi government which will allow us to rotate our troops out and finally bring them home."

* For some reason, "mysterious illnesses" and Iraq seem to be a natural fit for US soldiers. Hopefully, the second Gulf War won't have as much of a negative fallout as the first for veterans.

* In perhaps a related piece, Larry Johnson of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports on depleted uranium's sinister legacy in Iraq.

* According to John Pilger, American war reporting projects a sort of "down-home chauvinism which celebrates the victimhood of the invader," while at the same time "casting the vicious imperialism" of the Iraq assault "as benign."

* Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber, authors of the recently released Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, further explain how PR was used to sell the Iraq war. A corresponding article by Danny Schechter examines those "pervasive Western propaganda techniques built into American media presentation formats," and how they were deployed to garner support for the invasion.

* Anti-American sentiment is extraordinarily high around the globe, so the Bush administration is going to unleash even more PR to promote a friendlier image of the US.

* The US has told Niger to shut up about the forged Iraq-uranium documents, or face a nasty reprisal. This scandal is, indeed, far from over. Check out this detailed timeline from Benedict@Large to get an idea of how convoluted the Niger story is, and how it relates to significant events in the runup to war and the neoconservative ascendancy in the Bush administration.

* On the heels of "yellowcakegate," shall we begin the "next debate" over the Iraq-Al Qaeda conection, as Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon implored two weeks ago? The Boston Globe suggests so: "a review of the White House's statements and interviews with current and former intelligence officials indicate that the assertion [of an Iraq-Al Qaeda link] was extrapolated from nuggets of intelligence, some tantalizing but unproven, some subsequently disproved, and some considered suspect even at the time the administration was making its case for war."

* The press conference given by George Bush before embarking on his summer vacation was absolutely pathetic. It also might have been indicative of a government on the brink of crisis.

* Afghanistan is on the brink of chaos, as attacks from pro-Taliban forces on US-led forces increase daily.

* The Knesset has passed a law preventing Palestinians who marry Israelis from living in Israel, reports Justin Huggler of the Independent. Under the new provision, which B'Tselem has labelled racist, "Palestinians alone will be excluded from obtaining citizenship or residency. Anyone else who marries an Israeli will be entitled to Israeli citizenship."

* Is Israel building a fence, a wall, or something else?

* Why is the US turning a blind eye to Israel's nukes? For background, see the BBC's controversial take on "Israel's Secret Weapon": part I; part II.

* Good news on the American economy, for a change? Depends on how you look at it. The improvements in this month's economic figures were spurred mostly by a significant jump in defense spending. And, while the unemployment rate dipped by 0.2% in July, it was mostly because the labor force contracted. The real unemployment rate isn't hovering around 6.5%; it's actually around 10.5%. Here's some additional reasons why you shouldn't believe the new jobless stats.

* The Bush administration's handling of the budget, and its imposition of tax cuts is a "form of looting," says Berkeley economist and Nobel laureate George Akerlof. If the fiscal damage isn't addressed soon, Akerlof warns: "Future generations and even people in ten years are going to face massive public deficits and huge government debt. Then we have a choice. We can be like a very poor country with problems of threatening bankruptcy. Or we're going to have to cut back seriously on Medicare and Social Security. So the money that is going overwhelmingly to the wealthy is going to be paid by cutting services for the elderly."

* The CSM reports that a growing number of high-tech and service jobs in the US are destined to be outsourced to places like India, the Philippines, Russia, and China over the next decade. Whether this future loss will rival the blow to the US manufacturing sector over the past 20+ years remains to be seen. Read more on the "offshoring" of the tech sector.

* The Washington Post reported over the weekend that Colin Powell is going to step down if Bush is reelected in 2004. Now, the report is being denied.

* The US leads the race for space, writes the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's Jack Kelly.

* Are computerized voting machines a wide-open back door to massive voting fraud? With Diebold in the picture, the answer is an adamant "yes."

* Humanitarian intervention? Ian Williams says yea; John MacArthur says nay.

* It's been 25 years since the publication of his pathbreaking Orientalism, and Edward Said still finds his thesis depressingly relevant. Concerning Iraq, he writes, "Without a well-organised sense that the people over there were not like 'us' and didn't appreciate 'our' values - the very core of traditional orientalist dogma - there would have been no war. The American advisers to the Pentagon and the White House use the same clichés, the same demeaning stereotypes, the same justifications for power and violence (after all, runs the chorus, power is the only language they understand) as the scholars enlisted by the Dutch conquerors of Malaysia and Indonesia, the British armies of India, Mesopotamia, Egypt, West Africa, the French armies of Indochina and North Africa. These people have now been joined in Iraq by a whole army of private contractors and eager entrepreneurs to whom shall be confided everything from the writing of textbooks and the constitution to the refashioning of Iraqi political life and its oil industry."

A Break

I'm away for the rest of the week. Posting will hopefully resume by Monday.